Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 2020050944, 2020050945, 9780367552404, 9781003095453, 9780367558581

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Locating and Dislocating Feminisms
PART 1: Constructing
1. Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt: Reclamation, Resilience, and Resistance
2. Winding Up to Be Unfurled: Art History as Casa Espiral
3. Insubordinate Bodies: Staging Protest and Torture in Regina Vater’s 1973 Nós Performance
4. Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev: The Nomadic Tent Between “Worlds”
PART 2: Mediating
5. Creation Stories: Australian Arts Feminism
6. Tseng Kwong Chi: 1979 and the Liminal Trans of Racial and Sexual Politics
7. Shades of Discrimination: The Emergence of Feminist Art in Apartheid South Africa
PART 3: Performing
8. Against the Body: Interpreting Ana Mendieta
9. Jung Kang-Ja: A Pioneer of Korean Experimental Art of the 1960s and 1970s
10. “Really African, and Really Kabuki Too”: Afro-Asian Possibility in the Work of Senga Nengudi
11. Kirsten Justesen: The Body as a Feminist and Artistic Tool
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985

Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 is a collection of essential essays that bring transnational feminist praxis into conversation with histories of feminist art in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The artistic practices and processes examined within these pages all centre on gender and sexual politics as they variously intersect with race, class, sovereignty, Indigeneity, citizenship, and migration at particular historical moments and within specific geopolitical contexts. The book’s central premise is that reconsidering this period from transnational feminist perspectives will enable new thinking about the critical commonalities and differences across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed practices that have contributed to the complex and multifaceted relationship between feminism and art today. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, visual culture, material culture, and gender studies. Jen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University. Trista E. Mallory is a mother and Independent Scholar. Angelique Szymanek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Architecture at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Cover image: Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jacqueline Martins.

Routledge Research in Gender and Art

Routledge Research in Gender and Art is a new series in art history and visual studies, focusing on gender, sexuality, and feminism. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. Representing Duchess Anna Amalia’s Bildung A Visual Metamorphosis from Political to Personal in Eighteenth-Century Germany Christina K. Lindeman Virgin Sacrifice in Classical Art Women, Agency, and the Trojan War Anthony F. Mangieri Emma Hamilton and Late Eighteenth Century European Art Agency, Performance, and Representation Ersy Contogouris Female Body Image in Contemporary Art Dieting, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm, and Fatness Emily L. Newman Class, Gender and Sexuality in Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy Valerie Hedquist Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft Shadows of Affect John Corso Esquivel Artist-Parents in Contemporary Art Gender, Identity, and Domesticity Barbara Kutis Feminist Visual Activism and the Body Edited by Basia Sliwinska Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1960 Edited by Kerry Greaves Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 Edited by Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory and Angelique Szymanek For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Gender-and-Art/book-series/RRGA

Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985

Edited by Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory and Angelique Szymanek

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory and Angelique Szymanek; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory and Angelique Szymanek to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kennedy, Jen, 1983- editor. | Mallory, Trista E., editor. | Szymanek, Angelique, editor. Title: Transnational perspectives on feminism and art, 1960-1985 / edited by Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory and Angelique Szymanek. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020050944 (print) | LCCN 2020050945 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367552404 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003095453 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism and art. | Art and society—History—20th century. Classification: LCC N72.F45 T73 2021 (print) | LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050944 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050945 ISBN: 978-0-367-55240-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-55858-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09545-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of figuresvii List of contributorsxi Acknowledgementsxvi Introduction: Locating and Dislocating Feminisms1 JEN KENNEDY, TRISTA E. MALLORY, AND ANGELIQUE SZYMANEK

PART 1

Constructing

25

1 Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt: Reclamation, Resilience, and Resistance

27

LISA BINKLEY

2 Winding Up to Be Unfurled: Art History as Casa Espiral41 SARAH LOOKOFSKY

3 Insubordinate Bodies: Staging Protest and Torture in Regina Vater’s 1973 Nós Performance

57

EMILY CITINO

4 Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev: The Nomadic Tent Between “Worlds”

72

CEREN ÖZPINAR

PART 2

Mediating

87

5 Creation Stories: Australian Arts Feminism

89

JACQUELINE MILLNER AND CATRONIA MOORE

vi  Contents

6 Tseng Kwong Chi: 1979 and the Liminal Trans of Racial and Sexual Politics

106

JANE CHIN DAVIDSON

7 Shades of Discrimination: The Emergence of Feminist Art in Apartheid South Africa

122

BRENDA SCHMAHMANN

PART 3

Performing

137

8 Against the Body: Interpreting Ana Mendieta

139

JULIA BRYAN-WILSON

9 Jung Kang-Ja: A Pioneer of Korean Experimental Art of the 1960s and 1970s

154

PHIL LEE

10 “Really African, and Really Kabuki Too”: Afro-Asian Possibility in the Work of Senga Nengudi169 ELLEN Y. TANI

11 Kirsten Justesen: The Body as a Feminist and Artistic Tool185 TANIA ØRUM

Bibliography Index

201 217

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1

4.2

Dr Margaret Johnson, ribbon skirt, c. late 1960s to early 1970s, polyester, cotton, beads. Courtesy of the Nova Scotia Museum. 29 Mali Kristia’n Po’l, ribbon skirt, c. 1864, woollen stroud and silk ribbon. Courtesy of the Nova Scotia Museum. 32 Cecilia Vicuña, Casa Espiral (Spiral House), 1966, photoreproduction of site-specific performative installation. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. 42 Cecilia Vicuña, Erased Spiral, Concón, Chile, 2009, mixed media. Photo credit James O’Hern. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. 43 Cecilia Vicuña, Canasto Espiral, 1986, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. 45 Cecilia Vicuña, Vellón espiral, 2010, unspun wool, site-specific installation. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. 46 Cecilia Vicuña, Instan, 2012, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. 47 Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins. 58 Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins. 59 Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins. 60 Regina Vater, Triptíco Nós, panel 1, 1972, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins. 62 Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins. 64 Nil Yalter, Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt) and Nil Yalter on the right, 1973, metal structure, industrial felt, animal skin, wool, leather, text, mixed media, 98 × 118 in. (249 × 300 cm). Photo credit: Mayotte Magnus Levinska. Image courtesy of the artist and Arter Collection, Istanbul. 73 Nil Yalter inside the metal construction of Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt), 1973, metal structure, industrial felt, animal skin, wool, leather, text, mixed media, 98 × 118 in. (249 × 300 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and Arter Collection, Istanbul. 77

viii  Figures 4.3

4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Nil Yalter, Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt) and the artist in the making process with the inscriptions visible around the tent, 1973, metal structure, industrial felt, animal skin, wool, leather, text, mixed media, 98 × 118 in. (249 × 300 cm). Photo credit: Mayotte Magnus Levinska. Image courtesy of the artist and Arter Collection, Istanbul. 79 Nil Yalter, a panel from Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt), 1973, pencil, coloured pencil, and photocopies on cardboard, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Arter Collection, Istanbul. 82 Nil Yalter, Rahime, Kurdish Woman from Turkey (detail), 1979, photographs and drawings, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist. 82 Ailsa O’Connor, Not titled, 1975, lithograph, printed in black ink from one stone, 23 1/2 × 18 in. (59.4 × 46 cm). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia, Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund 1991. 92 Vivienne Binns, Vag Dens, 1966, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on composition board, 48 × 36 × 1 in. (122 [h] × 91.5 [w] × 2.5 [d] cm). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia. 94 Thancoupie, hand-built, gas-fired, carved pots and stoneware with oxide decoration, reduced, with an ash glaze; Trinity Bay, Queensland, Australia, 1984. Courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum. 97 Tseng Kwong Chi, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1979, from the selfportrait series East Meets West, 1979–1989, 15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1 cm). © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. 107 Tseng Kwong Chi, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1979, from the selfportrait series East Meets West, 1979–1989, 14.2 × 14.2 in. (36 × 36 cm). © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. 108 Photograph of Mao Zedong with his daughter Li Na in Beijing, 1953, silver gelatin black and white photograph, 7.9 × 9.6 in. (20 × 24.5 cm). Photograph by Hou Bo. Licensed under Creative Commons. 113 View of Golden Gate from Angel Island, 2013, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Reproduction number, LC-USZ62-123456. 115 Ma Yuan, On a Mountain Path in Spring, c. 1190–1225, album leaf, ink and slight colour on silk, 10.8 × 17.0 in (27.4 × 43.1 cm). National Palace Museum. Licensed under Creative Commons. 119 Kim Siebert, What did your mother ever tell you about the Hard Edge School?, 1986, photo collage on board with painted frame. Courtesy of the Iziko SANG Collection. 123 Penny Siopis, Embellishments (detail), 1982, oil and plastic ballerinas on canvas, 59.1 × 79.5 in. (150 × 202 cm). Photo credit: Paul Mills. Courtesy of the Wits Art Museum. 125 Sue Williamson, A Few South Africans: Winnie Mandela, 1983, photo etching and screen-print, 27.6 × 25 in. (70 × 63.5 cm). Courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town. 126 Marion Arnold, Insight, 1985, watercolour, 21.4 × 29.9 in. (54.5 × 76 cm). Courtesy of the Standard Bank Collection, Johannesburg. 128 Leora Farber, Delusions of Grandeur, 1987, oil on canvas, 48 × 63 in. (122 × 160 cm). Courtesy of the artist. 132

Figures ix 8.1

Ana Mendieta, Moffitt Building Piece, 1973, super-8 mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, colour, silent, running time: 3:17 minutes, edition of 8 with 3 APs. GP1589.1 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 140 8.2 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant), 1972/1997, suite of seven colour photographs, each: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm), edition of 10 with 3 APs. GP0643.7 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 143 8.3 Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, from Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973–1977, 1976/1991, colour photograph, 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm), edition of 20 with 4 APs. GP0420-2.18 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 145 8.4 Ana Mendieta, Guabancex (Esculturas Rupestres) [Goddess of the Wind (Rupestrian Sculptures)], 1981 (exhibition copy), black and white photograph, 41 × 53.5 in. (104.1 × 135.9 cm), mounted: 41 × 53.5 × 2 in. (104.1 × 135.9 × 5.1 cm). GL918 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 146 8.5 Ana Mendieta, Furrows, 1984, suite of five colour photographs, each: 8 × 10 in. (20.5 × 25.5 cm), GL4243© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 150 9.1 The Shinjeon Group, Transparent Balloons and Nude, performance May 30, 1968, performance, balloons, music of John Cage, 7:14 minutes. Image provided by Arario Gallery. Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery.155 9.2 Jung Kang-Ja and members of the Shinjeon Group, Kiss Me, 1967, plaster, paint, wood, rubber gloves, sunglasses, light bulb, mask. Image provided by Arario Gallery. Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery. 157 9.3 Jung Kang-Ja, Suppressed, 1968, cotton, iron pipe, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery. 161 9.4 Jung Kang-Ja, Moo-Che (No Body ) exhibition poster. Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery. Image Provided by Arario Gallery. 163 9.5 Jung Kang-Ja, Myongdong, 1973, oil on canvas, 63.9 × 51.3 inches (162.2 × 130.3 cm). Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery. 165 10.1 Senga Nengudi, Costume Study for Mesh Mirage, 1977. Photo credit: Adam Avila. Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Lévy Gorvy, New York and London; Sprüth Magers. 170 10.2 Reproduction of Inside/Outside, 1977 as it appears on the invitation to the R.S.V.P. exhibition (front), Just Above Midtown Gallery, New York, 1977, Senga Nengudi papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA. 172

x  Figures 10.3 Invitation to the R.S.V.P. exhibition (back), Just Above Midtown Gallery, New York, 1977, Senga Nengudi papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA. 172 10.4 Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger with Performance Piece, Pearl C. Wood Gallery, 1977. Photo credit: Harmon Outlaw; Senga Nengudi. Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery Archives, New York. 173 10.5 Senga Nengudi, Studio Performance with R.S.V.P., 1976, nylon mesh, sand, dried rose petals, and full-length wool skirt. Shown: R.S.V.P. X. Photo credit: Ken Peterson. Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Lévy Gorvy, New York and London; and Sprüth Magers. 174 10.6 Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, Los Angeles, 1978, from right to left: David Hammons (holding staff), Senga Nengudi (in yellow drapery) and Maren Hassinger (in white); Upper left: Freeway Fets installation. Courtesy of Levy Gorvy, New York and London. 181 11.1 Kristen Justesen, Sculpture I, 1968, 39.4 × 39.4 × 3.4 in. (100 × 100 × 10 cm). Courtesy of the artist. 187 11.2 Kristen Justesen, Sculpture II, 1968, 19.7 × 23.6 × 23.6 in. (50 × 60 × 60 cm). Courtesy of the artist. 188 11.3 Kristen Justesen, Omstændigheder (Circumstances), The PVC Series 1970–1971, one of 11 PVC vacuumed casts, mixed media, paint on wood, 24.4 × 18.9 × 7.1 in. (62 × 48 × 18 cm). Courtesy of the artist. 195 11.4 Kristen Justesen, Klassekampen (Class Struggle), 1976, pigment print on Somerset Satin-Enhanced 350 gr, 68.9 × 94.5 in. (175 × 240 cm). Courtesy of the artist. 197 11.5 Kristen Justesen, Lunch, 1975, C-print, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. 198

List of Contributors

Editors’ Bios Jen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario; she is also a founding member of Open Art Histories and has collaborated with Berkeley-based artist, Liz Linden since 2009. Her current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, primarily focuses on cyberfeminist artistic practices in the 1990s and their precedents. She has also researched and written extensively on feminist, radical, and experimental pedagogies in the arts and gender in the Situationist International. Her work has been published in Grey Room, Women and Performance, and the Journal of Feminist Scholarship among other places. Her collaborative work with Linden has been presented and performed at the Hammer Museum, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. Trista E. Mallory’s work has engaged with feminisms and feminist pedagogical practices. She holds a Ph.D. from Western University, Canada and served as parttime faculty at the New School and faculty and Instructor for Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, New York from 2014 to 2017. With Maura Brewer and Aliza Shvarts, she co-founded the Arts Research Collective and served as faculty there from 2017 to 2020. Angelique Szymanek is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY where she teaches courses on Modern and Contemporary Art. Her research focuses on feminist art and activism with a particular interest in histories of sexual violence. Her writings on the subject have been published in Art Journal, Signs: A Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Women’s Art Journal, and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship for which she served as co-editor of the special issue, A Gun for Every Girl. She has twice been named a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Scholar (2016 and 2017) and was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum for American Art Independent Study Program in 2012–2013. She is the recipient of a 2019–2020 Fulbright US Scholar Award to conduct research on the production of feminist art in Scotland.

xii  List of Contributors

Authors’ Bios Lisa Binkleyis an Anishinaabe (Algonquin)-settler, who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her primary research focuses on Indigenous and settler women’s textiles and needlework during the long nineteenth century. Lisa is co-editor of Stitching the Self: Identity and the Needle Arts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and has recently published in two Bloomsbury Academic edited volumes, Craft and Heritage: Intersections in Critical Studies and Practice (forthcoming 2020) and Craft is Political (forthcoming 2021), as well as in the Journal of Canadian Art History (2019). Her forthcoming monograph (UBC Press, 2021) explores historical quilts made by Indigenous and settler women in Canada and the borderlands. When Lisa was in the process of writing for this volume, she was actively involved in making ribbon skirts with Indigenous students and colleagues from across Turtle Island at Dalhousie in preparation for the upcoming annual Dalhousie Mawio’mi (powwow) and Mi’kma’ki (Maritime Provinces) Treaty Day celebrations. Julia Bryan-Wilsonteaches at the University of California, Berkeley; she is also the Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center and Adjunct Curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009); Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017), which was the winner of the ASAP Book Prize, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award. With Andrea Andersson, she curated the exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen. Jane Chin Davidsonis an art historian whose research focuses on transnationalism in relation to Chinese identity, feminism/eco-feminist, curatorial histories, and global exhibitions of contemporary art. Her recent publications include the monograph Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (University of Manchester Press, 2020) and the co-edited volume Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum (Routledge, 2017). She is co-editor of the special journal issue “Curatorial Impacts—the Futures of Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019)” for NKA Journal, Vol. 48 (May 2021), in addition to the special issue on “Restaging Exhibitions” for The Journal of Curatorial Studies Vol. 8, No. 2 (2019). She has published in numerous scholarly journals, including Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art; Wagadu: Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies; Journal of Visual Culture; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; and Third Text. Her essay contributions in edited collections include Catherine Dormor and Basia Sliwinska, eds., Transnational Belonging and Subjectivity-In-Process: Contemporary Women Artists’ Encounters with Space (Bloomsbury, 2021); Alpesh Kantilal Patel and Yasmeen Siddiqui, eds., Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Storytellers of Art Histories (Intellect, 2021); Meiling Cheng, ed. Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres (Routledge, 2015); and Jonathan Harris, ed., Dead History, Live Art? (University of Liverpool, 2007). Chin Davidson is also a curator of contemporary art exhibitions and her feminist projects include the 2013 Inner Space, Global Matter—Recording from the Structures Within, a three-site exhibition at UHCL, Johnson Space Center, and Florida International University; and also, Setting the Table: The 30th Anniversary of

List of Contributors xiii Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the University of Houston—Clear Lake (2011). Chin Davidson is an Associate Professor of Art History/Global Cultures at California State University, San Bernardino. She serves on the editorial board of CAA’s Art Journal, and she was part of the NWSA Women of Color Leadership Project; and an ESRC fellow at the Cultural Theory Institute, University of Manchester. Emily Citinoholds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Utah, where she studied Modern and Contemporary Art with a concentration on women artists from the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil. She received a B.A. in Art History from the University of Houston, during which she held an internship in the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2018, she received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship to further her studies in Brazilian culture and conduct archival research in São Paulo for her graduate thesis on the Brazilian artist Regina Vater, of which her contribution to the anthology is based. She currently lives in Nashville, TN, where she works as a faculty assistant in the Law and Economics Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt University. Phil Leeis an art historian, critic, and curator. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Fine Art at Hongik University. She is an editor of Dansaekhwa 1960s–2010s: Primary Documents on Korean Abstract Painting (MCST&CAMS, 2017). Her essays include “JungjinLee: The Trans-territorial Photographic Tableaux” (Spector Books, 2018), “Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method by Joan Kee” (caa.reviews, 2017), and “Archives of Postmemory in Contemporary Korean Photography” (photographies, forthcoming). She is currently working on a book titled The Storytellers: Women Photographers in Korea with a grant from the Amore Pacific Foundation. Sarah Lookofskyis an art historian and curator. She is currently dean of the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo (KHiO). Prior to that, she was Associate Director of the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she worked on research and publications devoted to art the art histories beyond North American and Western Europe. In previous roles, she was Faculty Member and the Instructor for Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program; general advisor to the 9th Berlin Biennale curated by the DIS collective; and the arts editor for DIS Magazine. She has put on exhibitions for large and small venues, mostly with limited budgets but lots of camaraderie, including at apexart, Aarhus Kunsthal, Art in General, Smack Mellon, Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, and Gallery Miroslav Kraljević. She has taught at the University of California, San Diego and the New School in New York and holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego and a B.A. in Film and Media Studies from the University of Copenhagen. She is also a mother—a role that has often been frustratingly at odds with all of the above. Jacqueline Millneris Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University. Until recently, she was Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She has published widely on contemporary Australian and International Art in key anthologies, journals, and catalogues of national and international galleries and museums. Her books include Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art (Artspace, 2010), Australian Artists

xiv  List of Contributors in the Contemporary Museum (Ashgate, with Jennifer Barrett, 2014), Fashionable Art (Bloomsbury, with Adam Geczy, 2015), and Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes (Routledge, co-edited with Catriona Moore, 2018). She has curated major multi-venue exhibitions and public programs, including Curating Feminism (2014), Future Feminist Archive (2015), Femflix (2016), and received several prestigious research grants and residencies, including from the Australia Council, Arts NSW, Bundanon Trust, and Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris. She co-convenes the research cluster Contemporary Art and Feminism (contemporaryartandfeminism. com) and is currently leading the research project Care: Feminism, Art, Ethics in the Age of Neoliberalism (2018–2021), and completing the manuscript Contemporary Art and Feminism for Routledge with Catriona Moore. Website:www.contemporaryartandfeminism.com Catriona Mooreis a Senior Lecturer in Australian and contemporary art at the University of Sydney. She has researched and published widely on women artists and feminist art since the 1980s, including the pioneering texts Indecent Exposures: Twenty Years of Australian Feminist Photography (Allen & Unwin, 1994) and Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–1990 (ed. Catriona Moore; Allen & Unwin, 1994). Her most recent book is Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes, co-edited with Jacqueline Millner (2018), with whom she is co-authoring the book Contemporary Art and Feminism (Routledge). Catriona is a founding member of the Australian research cluster Contemporary Art and Feminism and co-convenor of the “Future Feminist Archive”, in which artists engage with scattered or otherwise vulnerable feminist archives and collections to create further research, exhibitions, workshops, performances, and publishing outcomes. Website:www.contemporaryartandfeminism.com Tania Ørumis an Associate Professor Emerita in the Department for Cultural Studies and the Arts, University of Copenhagen. She has written widely on modernism and the avant-garde; most recently, she has published De eksperimenterende tressere (Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2009) on the cross-aesthetic experiments of the Danish avant-garde of the 1960s. She was Coordinator of the Danish research network “Avantgardernes genkomst og aktualitet” (The Return and Actuality of the AvantGardes) supported by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (2002–2004) and Director of the Nordic Network of Avant-Garde Studies supported by the Nordic Research Council, Nordforsk (2005–2009). Ørum was the Chairman of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) from 2007–2008 and is currently a member of the Steering Committee of EAM (2007–present). She is the main editor of the four volumes of The Cultural History of the Nordic Avant-Garde under publication/edition to appear at Rodopi/Brill, Amsterdam and New York (2012–2021). Dr Ceren Özpınaris a Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton in Brighton, United Kingdom. Dr Özpınar’s research focuses on contemporary art, art historiography and feminist art, and art histories since 1960 with a special interest in Turkey and the Middle East. Her first monograph, The Art Historiography in Turkey (1970–2010), was published in 2016 by the History Foundation in Istanbul, and the next one, titled Politics of Writing Art Histories:

List of Contributors xv Narratives of Contemporary Art, Feminism and Women Artists from Turkey, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Dr Özpınar is the co-editor with Mary Kelly (née Healy) of the volume, Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today, published by The British Academy and Oxford University Press in 2020. Her research has also been published in peerreviewed journals such as Art Journal. Since 2020, Dr Özpınar leads a research team for AWARE: Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions, an online database that seeks to restore the presence of twentieth-century women artists in the art historical canon. Brenda Schmahmannis Professor and holds the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. An art historian, she has done extensive work on gender in South African art and the politics of public art. She is the author of Through the Looking Glass: Representations of South African Women Artists (2004), Mapula: Embroidery and Empowerment in the Winterveld (2006), Picturing Change: Curating Visual Culture at Post-Apartheid Universities (2013), and The Keiskamma Art Project: Restoring Hope and Livelihoods(2016). The editor or co-editor of Material Matters (2000), Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa, 1910–1994, Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents (2017) as well as Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism (2020), she has edited or co-edited various special issues of journals, including a special issue of African Arts on gender (2012) and a special issue of Textile: Cloth and Culture on intertextuality and parody (2017). She has published more than 70 scholarly articles or book chapters as well as many reviews and has curated two large-scale travelling exhibitions. Ellen Y. Taniis the 2020–2022 A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC. Her research in AfricanAmerican and contemporary art engages the fields of American art, critical race studies, and feminism and has been supported by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African-American Studies, the Clark Art institute, and the Getty Research Institute. As the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, she led the museum’s object-based teaching program and curated, among other shows, Second Sight: the Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art, which centred issues of race and disability within histories of conceptual art. At the ICA Boston, she presented the work of Nina Chanel Abney, Huma Bhabha, and Tschabalala Self and developed the travelling exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. Her writing appears in exhibition monographs of Charles Gaines and Senga Nengudi; Art Journal, American Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History in 2015 from Stanford University.

Acknowledgements

Each of the editors’ educational and professional paths have crossed or run parallel at numerous times over the past 12 years. The shifting formation of our positions as art historians, therefore, share common grounds that have been tended to by mentors, educators, and scholars whose intellectual and, at times, emotional labour has supported our work and forged meaningful relationships between us and others who have thought, written, and taught from this common yet uneven terrain. This project is rooted in soil that has been tilled and enriched by countless authors, artists, curators, and teachers who constitute the nebulous discipline of feminist art history. We would like to begin by thanking our commissioning editor at Routledge, Isabella Vitti, for opening this door and trusting us with this, our first, major book. Katie Armstrong has been a constant source of professionalism and guidance from the early days of this project. Béatrice Cloutier-Trépanier worked tirelessly to complete the bibliography and index, as well as editing our endnotes. Scott Watterton is the best copy editor that money cannot buy. Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 would not have been possible without generous funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as the support of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University. We are grateful to Liz Linden for her friendship and formative conversations as we were working to articulate the priorities and structure of the book. Elizabeth Otto’s advice and mentorship have guided us through this project, from formulating the proposal to finding a publisher. Her generosity, kindness, and reminders that this project was worth pursuing sustained us throughout this process. Our sincere thanks to Liz Park, Sarah Lookofsky, and Daniella Rose King for sharing their expertise and recommending sources as we were finding contributors and developing our bibliography. Their comments on the first drafts of our introduction were invaluable. We could not hope for more engaged and thoughtful readers and colleagues. Thank you to Jennifer González for her incisive reading of the introduction. Her feedback not only helped hone the introduction but also challenged us in ways that will shape our scholarship moving forward. The introduction also benefited enormously from Marsha Meskimmon’s close reading. Her books have been a model for bringing transnational feminist perspectives to bear on histories of feminist art and we are humbled by her support of this project. We extend our deepest thanks to both for selflessly giving their time during a particularly difficult and chaotic year.

Acknowledgements xvii The constructive responses of the blind peer reviewers were equally integral to the development of the book. Aruna D’Souza has been our teacher since we were graduate students. Her continued and consistent presence as a mentor has been instrumental to this project. We look to her work as a model for the kind of engaged, activist scholarship to which we aspire. We feel incredibly fortunate to count her among our readers and truly appreciate the graciousness with which she provided challenging but necessary feedback that pushed us to rethink our own positions, strategies, and methods as feminist scholars. We are honoured that our first book project includes the writing and artwork of such an inspiring group of feminist scholars. We appreciate the contributors’ unshakable dedication to the project in the face of many challenges. Their time, rigour, enthusiasm, care, and truly excellent research are the cornerstone of this book. Thank you to all of the artists who have shared their work, archives, and recollections. And especially to Regina Vater who gifted us permission to use the photograph of her 1973 performance Nós that graces the cover of this book. The support and love of all of the people we count as our families made this book possible.

Introduction Locating and Dislocating Feminisms Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory, and Angelique Szymanek

This book brings transnational feminist praxis into conversation with histories of feminist art in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s; decades during which artistic practices and discourses became increasingly intertwined with social movement activism around the world.1 In the midst of independence struggles across Africa and Asia, the Cold War and its proxies, revolutions, and dictatorships reverberating throughout Latin America, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Civil Rights and Red Power in North America, among the numerous other social, political, economic, and cultural events that remapped the globe during this period, art became a vital mode of political engagement and worldmaking. Although they do not amount to a chronological or linear narrative, the works of art examined within these pages all centre on gender and sexual politics as they variously intersect with race, class, sovereignty, Indigeneity, citizenship, and migration at particular historical moments and within specific geopolitical contexts. The essays that explore these practices are diverse and at some points contradictory. Each author proposes a different model for revisiting these crucial decades in art history from a transnational feminist perspective and, in doing so, for returning to close analysis of artistic practices to also rethink some of the entrenched historical narratives that have framed them. 2 Although the timeframe of this anthology begins in the 1960s, a moment that has been widely mythologised as the originary scene of a dominant history of feminist art, renewing debates about origins is not its aim. Rather, the book’s central premise is that reconsidering this period from transnational feminist perspectives will enable new thinking about the critical commonalities and differences across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed practices of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s that have contributed to the complex and multifaceted relationship between feminism and art today. Not all of the artists discussed within these pages explicitly called themselves feminists nor did they necessarily describe their work as such. In fact, some rejected the term outright as a form of Western imperialism or White, middle-class politics. The argument made by each of the contributing authors, and the collection as a whole, is that all of the artistic practices examined here modelled ways of engaging with gender and sexual politics through visual and material experimentation that are significant to a broad range of feminisms.3 The prefix trans in transnational signals many possible relationships across, between, and beyond national boundaries, as well as those that fundamentally challenge or change them. Transnational feminist practices and coalitions may thus traverse material or ideological borders, or take the form of local struggles connecting, directly and indirectly, with other local struggles in different, sometimes far-off places. They

2  Jen Kennedy et al. may also appear, at first glance, regionally specific, but transcend locality through their engagement with the multiple ways in which global systems and dynamics are embedded within the local.4 The individual essays in this book examine some of these different manifestations of the transnational and, more specifically, how artists negotiated them. Lisa Binkley, for example, explores the production of material culture as a form of self-determination and resistance enacted by Mi’kmaq women within the oppressive context of settler-colonial nation-building on stolen lands. Phil Lee looks at Jung Kang-Ja’s contributions to the development of international happenings and feminist art within the context of post-independence Korea. Ellen Y. Tani takes a different tack, tracing Senga Nengudi’s travels and engagements with Afro-Asian rituals in her performative work. Like the groundbreaking exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2009), this anthology eschews the geographical organisation of multinational or global studies. Instead, it foregrounds artistic processes that cross borders and places diverse practices side-by-side to initiate a conversation about their commonalities and differences.5

Transnational Feminisms and Histories of Art Since the late-2000s, feminist scholars and curators of contemporary art have increasingly turned their attention to the myriad ways in which the gendered processes of art’s production, display, reception, and consumption are enmeshed in the structures of globalisation, structures which have uneven effects determined by gender, race, class, and other forms of inequity: these include forced and voluntary migration, climate crisis, flows of capital and commodities, networked communications technologies, neocolonialism, and war.6 With few exceptions, however, this work has focused on the period after 1989, when international relations across the world were reconfigured and rebuilt in the aftermath of the Cold War and amid an intense acceleration of global capitalism. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have shown, the conjoining of the terms trans and national, as an alternative to global or international, was a response to the loosening and, in some cases, disintegration of nation-state formations during this phase of globalisation.7 A consequence of this periodisation has been that many transnational histories of art either implicitly or explicitly position the political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 as having precipitated novel forms of feminist art production that are distinct from those which preceded them. The contributions in this book make evident that artists of an earlier moment were also working across geographic, disciplinary, and political boundaries in ways that can now be defined as transnational. Building on the critical insights and methodologies of feminist art historians and curators including Cornelia Butler, Angela Dimitrakaki, Lucy Lippard, Marsha Meskimmon, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly, Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek, Griselda Pollock, and Ella Shohat, among others, one of the implicit questions raised by the present collection of texts is, to what extent did the development of these artistic practices in the decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the popularisation of the internet, and the formation of the World Trade Organization, facilitate the dispersion of feminist discourses that followed these geopolitical transformations? This question is informed by transnational feminist theory—which grounds ways of knowing in experiences and actions—while also proposing that transnational feminist artistic practices existed before the field was named as such in the 1990s,

Introduction 3 when Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) activists and scholars sought new language to describe the relationship of their work to a transformed geopolitical context.8 Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty were among the first scholars to use the term “transnational feminism” in the introduction to their 1996 anthology, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, to describe feminist praxis that builds on postcolonial studies, the Black Women’s Liberation Movement, Third World feminisms, and Third World Marxist theories and activisms, and also to distinguish their approach from the homogenising discourses of “global sisterhood”.9 However, most agree that this field of thought and action has multiple genealogies, including the immigration reforms, decolonial battles, and other grassroots movements of the 1960s and 1970s.10 Transnational feminism is rooted in the intersectional activist strategies and politics of groups such as the Third World Women’s Alliance (1968), Rødstrømpebevægelsen (Redstockings, 1970), the Where We At Collective (1971), Women of All Red Nations (1974), and The Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meetings, 1981), as well as in the organising that took place at the 1971 Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference coordinated by The Voice of Women/Women Strike for Peace in Vancouver, BC, which brought together liberation and anti-war activists from several Third World countries, Canada, and the United States.11 The language that has developed to describe these early feminist activities was prefigured by Frances Beal’s pamphlet “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” (1969), the Combahee River Collective’s (CRC) use of the term “simultaneity” in “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977), as well as in Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga’s edited volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), and Debrah King’s “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology” (1988), all of which predate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s coining of the term “intersectionality” in 1989.12 The intersectional modes through which many of these formative authors and activists worked laid the foundation not only for transnational feminisms in US contexts, but also for the development of queer theory. The CRC, for example, broke away from the Black National Feminist Organization in 1974 to develop an activist agenda that centred explicitly on Black lesbian feminist politics.13 And, Anzaldúa offered queer mestiza consciousness as a framework for undoing binary identity categories and articulating the interconnectedness of sexuality, gender, and race within lived experience.14 Indeed, it could be argued that transnational feminisms have developed in and through the theoretical and methodological contributions of queer feminists of colour. Artistic practices in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s were another important site for developing a range of actions and ideas that have become vital to transnational feminist praxis. As the case studies examined in this book demonstrate, artists have been exploring the material and ideological effects of globalisation on individuals’ experiences and understandings of gender, and facilitating strategic transnational, transcultural, and transdisciplinary collaborations, dialogues, and exchanges, since well before 1989. The difficulty—or arguably the impossibility—of telling the stories of these divergent engagements and exchanges in a linear way presents a significant challenge to conventional art historical methodologies, which have prioritised narratives of influence and progress in addition to centring on European and Anglo-American “canons”. After over three decades of critical thinking about the effects of postcolonial theory, Third World feminisms, the global-turn, and the rise of material and visual culture

4  Jen Kennedy et al. studies, however, the discipline is now in the midst of a transformation. Its geographical boundaries, visual and material objects, historical sources, and theoretical frameworks are being actively debated, deconstructed, and reimagined. Beyond expanding the geographic scope of the field, this ongoing process has raised pressing questions about how art historical work might be done differently so that its own structural biases, assumptions, and values are not only brought to light but radically challenged. In her introduction to Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (2014), a volume of essays that developed from a conference of the same name, co-organiser Aruna D’Souza asks: “What models might scholars turn to in order to deal with the radical difference, uneveness, and even untranslatability that emerge when one attempts to bring into conversation fundamentally different instances of cultural production?”15 Posing a further challenge, some scholars have questioned whether, given the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline, any effort to globalise art history will necessarily be a form of cultural imperialism, imposing Western ways of looking and knowing on cultures from around the world.16 Of course, the answer to this question depends on how one defines art history. Is it defined by its objects of study? A broader purpose or goal? Its methods or tools? If it is the latter, what new approaches must scholars develop and what examples might guide us to meaningfully engage with such vastly different forms of cultural production and their unique histories without recolonising them? The seed for this book came in part from the editors’ desire for a conversation about feminist art and its histories in response to these larger disciplinary questions. Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 thus joins a growing body of work that is transforming art histories through methodologies that reorient the geographic and cultural mapping of the discipline.17 The curatorial, scholarly, and artistic projects that are catalysing these changes in feminist art histories in particular have drawn from Third World, postcolonial, and transnational feminisms to put the centrality of the “west” as both a geographical and an ideological origin for the development of art and its reception under intense scrutiny. This anthology contributes to this project by building on the models provided by transnational feminist thought and practice of the last 20 years in their fundamental challenge to the centre/periphery, east/west, White/non-White binary orientations that structure the cartography of hegemonic art histories. As Marsha Meskimmon describes it, “Transnational feminisms focus upon flows and multidimensional connections that profoundly unravel the ‘hub and spoke’ model, and, in so doing, move beyond any binary opposition between the local and the global, the personal and the political”.18 This diffusion of origin points and narratives poses a fundamental threat to the colonial logic that underpins the history of art and the assumptions about subjectivity upon which it is built. As distinct from a global approach, transnational feminisms take the local, the contextual, and the material as the grounds upon which the possibilities for solidarity and agency are forged. Transnational feminisms model ways of thinking and of working. Our own approach is collaborative. The processes of researching, reading, thinking, writing, and editing have been explicitly dialogic rather than individual in an effort to resist the illusion of epistemic mastery, to invite debate, and, as Richa Magar and Amanda Lock Swarr have observed, to recognise that “all academic production is necessarily collaborative”.19 These are just some of the reasons that collaboration has such a long and rich history as a feminist, and especially transnational feminist, methodology. Surveying transnational feminist literature since the 1990s, it is remarkable to note how many

Introduction 5 texts are co-authored and how many books are anthologies. As a field, transnational feminist scholarship has not only resisted the individualist imperatives of academia but has actively demonstrated that by working differently scholars might produce different understandings. When we first started to discuss the possibility of this book, we knew that it had to be an edited volume to reflect even a fraction of the diversity of positions and perspectives that are fundamental to transnational feminist praxis. Although we come from different backgrounds, we three editors are all White cisgender women. Two of us are junior, pre-tenure faculty at universities in Canada and the United States and one of us co-founded an alternative arts education collective. Importantly, we met and began working together as graduate students in an art history program at a public university in New York State. We have viewed editing this anthology as an opportunity to listen to and learn from the contributing authors who bring with them different histories, identifications, experiences, institutional positions, and orientations towards the themes and politics of this book. In a looser sense, the book is the result of many more layers of collaboration, which we have tried to highlight through citations. The work of a widely international community of feminist scholars, within and outside art history, has created the conditions of possibility for this project. Even so, the essays collected in this volume were, with few exceptions, researched and written within the frameworks of academia and art history. Although all the contributors challenge the conventions of these frameworks in their own ways and, in some cases, propose models for doing art history otherwise, 21 the effects of some of the very institutional and disciplinary priorities and practices that the book as a whole seeks to subvert are still evident in its final form. Most notably, in the disproportionate whiteness of the authors and subjects represented in the following pages. Since its inception, the principles and methodologies of art history have centred whiteness. Decades of work to dislodge this centring has shown that it is connected to archival records and established ideas about what counts as historical evidence, the collecting and display practices of museums and galleries, and pedagogical methods, among the many other concrete factors that simultaneously enable and constrain art historical work within academia. As BIPOC artists, academics, and museum professionals and allies have reiterated since at least the 1960s, and as a series of open letters in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in the spring of 2020 most recently reinforce: redressing racism within art history demands radical structural changes within the foundations (documenting, collecting, preserving, researching, writing, teaching, etc.) that have historically bound together to support White supremacy. 2 2 Transnational feminist praxis raises questions about what counts as evidence, what constitutes knowledge, whose histories have been recorded and why, who has the agency to tell these histories, and what forms scholarship and pedagogy might take. Absences and imbalances in the table of contents are the responsibility of the editors; they reveal the limitations of our own positions and bring into focus some of the structural forms of discrimination and privilege that support them. 20

Politics of Location The geographic scope of this book, which includes Australia, Brazil, Britain, Denmark, Chile, Korea, Mi’kmaq territories of Turtle Island, South Africa, Kurdish communities within Turkey, as well as the movements of members of the Japanese and Chinese-American diaspora, is in no way exhaustive nor does it attempt to transcend

6  Jen Kennedy et al. the real, imagined, and/or ideological boundaries that may serve to demark them. When brought to bear on feminist art history, transnational methodologies consider the local, global, and that which moves between them as co-constitutive. Feminist critiques of the nation-state have long pointed to the raced, sexed, classed, and gendered articulations of nationalism which police citizenship and map territories in “accordance with cross-border flows of capitalism, neoliberalism, and inter-, intra-, and extra-state violence”. 23 At the same time, some scholars have questioned whether the term transnational works against these critiques by inadvertently centring the nation. As Laura Briggs has demonstrated, this language is particularly thorny for Indigenous activists and scholars. Although their traditional lands often bisect national borders, 24 decolonisation is a call to renegotiate territories through the repatriation of land. 25 Any transnational feminist theory and practice will be complexly tied to nations as ideological and material formations. Indeed, these theories and practices have been activated by the uneven processes of globalisation, just as the process of globalising art history is connected to, and in some cases driven by, the internationalisation of financial systems, education, and neoliberalism.26 Transnational feminist art histories thus occupy the spaces and structures of global capitalism while simultaneously—and from the ground-up—agitating against them.27 In her 1984 essay, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location”, Adrienne Rich describes an approach to feminist theory and politics that begins with situated, material experiences and aims “to reconnect our thinking and our speaking with the body of this particular living individual, a woman”. 28 Epistemologically, a politics of location emphasises the determining roles of cultural differences and specificity of place in shaping experiences of, and ideas about, gender. Methodologically, it moves from practice to theory. Politics of location aim to transgress the same geopolitical “division of [feminist] labor” critiqued by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which artificially positions women in the North American-Western Europe axis as producers of feminist theory and women throughout the rest of the world as the subjects of that theory.29 By insisting on geographically and historically contingent experience as a source and site of knowledge, this approach not only multiplies and disperses the possible locations of feminism but, just as importantly, it suggests that “feminist” actions may proceed feminist theories, replacing the unidirectional relationship that Spivak problematises with a dialectical one.30 Put another way, it is the social, cultural, and political activities and experiences of actual women that enable the elaboration of any feminist theory. With or without the language or tools of transnational feminisms, the diverse artistic practices considered in this book exemplify the core ideas that have come to define them. As Mohanty has argued, feminist praxis grounded in the politics of location, or what she renames “the politics of experience” or “engagement”,31 has been particularly important for understanding the significance of cultural production as a form of political agency and action.32 As a material process, artmaking is a mode of engaging with the perceptible world that is complexly entangled with class, gender, race, social, and ethnic positions. As an imaginative activity, it is often a space through which these positions are challenged and new ones are forged, a site for “struggle and contestation about reality itself”. 33 Although Mohanty’s focus is on literature, we believe that her analysis just as persuasively applies to the production of material and visual culture, which involve the manipulation of an artist’s physical or representational environment through a series of material, conceptual, and aesthetic decisions and

Introduction 7 corresponding actions that are necessarily situated in place and time. Moving from politics of location to the politics of experience or engagement, however, emphasises that relationships to place, like locations themselves, are not fixed. It follows that, as deeply entrenched as they may be, identities, which are formed in relation to multiple and often conflicting circumstances and ideological systems, are also neither essential nor immutable, nor are they definitively “locatable”.34 For Amelia Jones, this “politics of positionality” is one of the most significant contributions of feminism.35 It is also another meaningful connection between transnational feminist scholarship and queer theory; both have imagined models of coalition and community-building that recognise the importance of particular histories, cultural logics, and processes of subject-formation without essentialising origins or identities. This book posits creative practices as sites from which such models might emerge.

Process and Positionality Each of the three sections in this book—Constructing, Mediating, and Performing— explore various ways in which a particular process has been used by artists in geographically and culturally diverse contexts to engage with ideas and questions about their own lived experiences of gender. Rather than having been editorially predetermined, the organising categories were generated by the subjects of the essays. The situated, embodied practices of specific artists are thus the starting point from which the multivalent feminist analyses of the contributing authors, and possibilities for cross-cultural comparison between essays and sections, emerge. Positioning artistic processes as the provisional first connection between cultural producers across geographical and ideological borders foregrounds the nuances of each artist’s particular practice in relation to its own histories and locations. At the same time, whether the result of influence or coincidence, concurrences between these materials and approaches illuminate affinities and suggest possible shared motivations which, in turn, serve as a point of departure for transnational feminist dialogue and debates. By foregrounding the entanglement rather than the opposition of being and knowing, practice and theory, the politics of experience describes a methodology that links multiple local, contingent, and sometimes conflicting gendered contexts to larger national, international, and transnational ideologies, structures, and the asymmetrical effects of late capitalism that thread between them. Tensions between voluntary migration and forced displacement, for example, appear across several essays, notably Ceren Özpınar’s discussion of Nil Yalter’s Round House (1973), which was based on the tents of the nomadic Turkmen tribes of Southern Anatolia. Transnational feminist scholarship positions the local and global as simultaneous and intertwined, just as the three sections in this book bring together close, materialist readings of the practices of a widely international group of artists; connections and affinities, as well as significant differences, are in tension in all contexts. Mohanty and others have shown that globalisation “writes its script” on the bodies and everyday live of feminized subjects, and particularly acutely on those in the diverse geographic regions that constitute the Two-Thirds World, Fourth World, and Global South, and argue that it is thus from their experiences that transnational feminist analysis ought to depart. 36 The process-based organisation of this book, which stresses the importance of epistemic location and material conditions of possibility, is one way of responding to this directive within the field of art history.

8  Jen Kennedy et al. Just as the artistic and curatorial practices examined throughout this book are embodied and situated, so too are the perspectives that the authors bring to them. The politics of location, experience, and engagement apply equally to the processes of feminist scholarship enacted throughout these pages. One way to approach the relationship between the essays that follow is as a conversation about artistic practices as gendered practices across geographies and across time. They are also deeply researched case studies examined from the viewpoints of art historians, curators, and artists with divergent stakes, political situations, cultural affiliations, institutional positions, and at different moments in their careers. One commitment that the editors and authors all share is, as scholars working within transnational feminist frameworks, the politics of locating ourselves in relation to the artists and works we seek to engage is of paramount importance. This is particularly evident in Julia BryanWilson and Jacqueline Millner and Catorina Moore’s contributions, which examine the role of critical reception, curatorial imperatives, and historiographies in shaping art’s meanings in the 1970s in the distinct contexts of the United States and Australia. Sarah Lookofsky and Jane Chin Davidson’s essays consider the ethics of viewing through their analyses of intersubjective exchanges between artists, audiences, and materials. Whereas Lookofsky’s methodology is modelled after the form of the works she considers, Chin Davidson’s interdisciplinary approach challenges the parameters of art historical discourse. Both authors highlight the ways that the sociocultural, political, and material conditions under which one is viewed and/or views informs these encounters. The same is true of the relationship between authors and their subjects, wherein the historically privileged position of a writer, for example, may risk rearticulating colonial paradigms when the subject of their analysis is situated in relation to power differently. The unique conditions within which one is making, viewing, or writing about art engender a multitude of methodological approaches that are as rife with discord as they are affinity. A transnational feminist art history, as Aruna D’Souza reminds us, is one that calls upon its reader to “sit with difference” while remaining open to the points of connection that become visible when we look across multiple sites of making. 37 Any attempt to tell a transnational history will be incomplete, and this anthology is no exception. Integral to feminist methodologies, however, are the measures taken to articulate a project’s own deficiencies, absences, and failures. There are many geographic regions that are not represented in this book and an endless number of diasporic communities whose routes of movement and intersections of identity are left unacknowledged by the cultural histories narrated in its pages. We are excited by the potential these areas offer for further research, the possibilities of which move beyond the limited set of materials, practices, and conceptual frameworks addressed in these pages. Trans and disability theories, as well as artists working in rural locales, are notably not represented in this book, a fact that reinforces the limits of its contribution.

Constructing The first section of this anthology, Constructing, brings together four essays that foreground feminist methods of material fabrication. The connections forged across the diverse modes of making under consideration are both material and methodological. Despite the cultural, geographic, social, and other differences that shape the

Introduction 9 conditions under which Margaret Johnson, Cecilia Vicuña, Regina Vater, and Nil Yater lived and worked, ephemerality, corporeality, duration, and community-building are among the “common differences” that their artistic practices share. Through their use of rope, thread, cloth, and earth, among other things, these artists construct forms that, like much of the materials from which they are made, are gendered. The knot, the spiral, and the stitch figure prominently as iterative, mutable, and ephemeral forms that trouble the systems of value, production, and profit in which they circulate. The word constructing denotes processes of building that are frequently associated with notions of order, stability, and structure. The essays that appear under this heading, however, resonate with the etymological roots of the word, which include the Latin construere, meaning “to pile up or heap”. The material and durational resonances of piling or heaping signal a cumulative process characterised by layering and structural vulnerability. Piles and heaps are open forms. They are slippery, precarious, and often defy easy measurement or containment. They are, therefore, both apt metaphors for the artistic processes discussed in this section as well as the organisational logic of the anthology. The receding sands and brittle driftwood of Vicuña’s Casa Espiral (1966), for example, construct a spiral that, as the title of the essay states, is wound only to be unfurled moments later. Similarly, the impermanence of Yalter’s nomadic tent structures and Vater’s performance Nós engage in methods of construction that are provisional by design, visible now only through the photographic documentation that enacts a building of its own kind: that of an archive. A pile or heap is often distinguished from a structure in form and content in so far as what is cast into them are materials that have been displaced, discarded, or deemed excessive. They are, however, structures nonetheless; constructed forms whose materiality and configurations defy the imperatives of patriarchal-colonial logics of containment and time. The artistic practices in this section, as well as the interpretative frameworks used by the authors to describe them, have been and, to a large extent remain, positioned as surfeit, peripheral, or simply unassimilable in relation to hegemonic histories of art. The scraps of fabric stitched together by the hand of Johnson to construct a Mi’kmaq ceremonial ribbon skirt signal the wearer’s relationship to both the earth that may touch the hem of the garment when worn and the community from which the materials were gathered. Whether tightly wrought at the end of the seamstresses’ fine thread or clumsily looped in thick coarse rope at the hands of many, in Johnson, Yalter, and Vater’s work, knots construct objects and interventions. The ribbon skirt by Margaret Johnson that was exhibited at Citadel Hall, Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1968 is an adaptation of earlier forms made of animal hide and it is crafted, instead, from wool, cotton, satin ribbon, and beads. The fabric used to construct the skirt, as author Lisa Binkley points out, was likely sourced from the discarded clothes of family members, a gesture of resourcefulness that makes visible the relationship of the object to its contemporary context. The patterns of the clothes signal Euro-American fashions of the 1970s, the colours and prints of which are then reworked to speak the visual language of Mi’kmaq spirituality and ceremony. In her essay on the exhibition of this skirt, Binkley describes it as a “cultural agent”, one that negotiates relations between colonial and Indigenous world views. In Mi’kmaq tradition, the ribbon skirt is a form of ceremonial dress that symbolises the wearer’s relationship to Mother Earth and to her foremothers. In its material and symbolic

10  Jen Kennedy et al. assertion of matrilineal Indigeneity, Johnson’s skirt, like many others of its kind, is evidence of the persistence and resistance of Mi’kmaq women. In the context of an exhibition intended to bolster Canadian nationalism, the skirt functions as evidence of Mi’kmaq presence as adaptive and resilient while foregrounding the role of women as keepers of past and generators of future cultural practices. The layered fabrics, stitched seams, and woven ribbon of Johnson’s skirt denote process, duration, and repetition, which are echoed in Sarah Lookofsky’s description of creating as an act that is “collective, mutable, and iterative”. In her analysis of Cecilia Vicuña’s Casa Espiral (1966), Lookofsky develops an interpretive framework that is born of the form of the artwork itself—the spiral—rather than imposing one upon it. Like the whirling of the ribbon skirt when mobilised by its wearer, the spiral moves in circles and arcs. Its movements defy the horizontal, the linear, the fixed. Created on the beach of Concón, Chile, Casa Espiral was constructed out of the materials on hand and was built to be undone. Like numerous performative and site-specific practices emerging at the time, the ephemerality of Vicuña’s spiral disrupted the notions of the unchanging, finished, and commodifiable art object. Noting an important distinction between the artist’s engagement with Land Art and that of her contemporaries, Lookofsky writes that for Vicuña, “the landscape is not static ground for the figure of the work; rather it is a relational presence that is the very condition of possibility for the work, allowing it to take shape and then to cease to exist”. This interconnectedness defies narratives of mastery and asks the viewer/interpreter to consider the relation of the artist to their material as one of reciprocity and interdependence. To approach artistic production in this way not only reconfigures dominant Euro-American art historical models but also, particularly when applied to art that is created in and of the land, destabilises the long-standing relations of dominance and ownership that characterise colonial-settler relations to the earth. The potential for materials to be used otherwise is at the heart of Emily Citino’s reading of Brazilian artist Regina Vater’s Nós (1973). Produced during the brutal regime known as anos de chumbo (“The Leaden Years”, 1968–1974), Vater’s public performance offered an injunction on the restrictive and deadly effects of the military dictatorship. Staged under the guise of a children’s public art program, Vater circumnavigated the instruments of censorship that threatened cultural production in Brazil during the dictatorship and offered the participants the opportunity to construct, play, and interact with large bundles of rope. Nós, which means “knots”, occurred on a Sunday afternoon in the well trafficked Praça Nossa Senhora da Paz in Rio de Janeiro. The activation of the material through public engagement, a hallmark of much performance of the time, decentred the role of the artist as author and, in the infinite and unpredictable iterations of rope play that were produced that afternoon, required a relinquishing of control over the work. Nós shares with Casa Espiral an ephemerality that remains open to repetition, and, as Citino points out, Vater’s intentions were for the performance to reoccur elsewhere and under the direction of other artists. Furthermore, the knot, like the spiral, is a form that is familiar and iterative. The knotted ropes of Nós, however, recall the material’s function as a tool of both bonding and binding, of rescue and capture. The paradoxical nature of Vater’s Nós resonates with that of Nil Yater’s 1973 work, Topak Ev or Roundhouse. As author Ceren Özpınar describes it, the installation features a round tent constructed with aluminium, animal-hide, and fabric that is modelled after dwellings built by the nomadic Turkmen tribes of Southern

Introduction 11 Anatolia. Frequently understood to function as an exclusively feminine space, the “round house” is read in relation to its masculinised counterpart, a black rectilinear tent. The anthropological record has conflicting accounts of these structures and their functions, varying as they do across particular tribal, geographic, and historical contexts. What persists, however, is the gendering of the structures and their shared status as identity markers for the nomadic peoples who inhabit them. The impermanence of the structures is, of course, a function of the nomadic patterns of movement traversed by the tribes now identified as the Alevi minority. Since the onset of sedentarisation policies of the 1950s and 1960s, the mobility and territorial instability of the tent and its inhabitants have been perceived as posing a threat to the creation of a unified and distinct Turkish national identity. Özpınar writes that Topak Ev poses a double threat as a structure that is both feminised and nomadic, each antithetical to the patriarchal imperatives of nationalism. The shape and materiality of the tents lend themselves to associations with the body and the womb, in particular. It is, as the author points out, perceived as both a haven for women and a prison; a homosocial space of care as well as a depoliticised silo. The lived reality as well as Yalter’s artworld proxy are, of course, both; a duality that has frequently been denied in the critical and historical accounts of the tents themselves as well as Yalter’s installation.

Mediating Although varied in their use of materials and techniques, the creative processes examined in the second section of this book are all forms of mediation. Whether through community organising, collaboration, assemblage, collage, performance-photography, or another means, each of the artists discussed here seeks to visually, conceptually, or materially straddle previously siloed ways of knowing, negotiate between multiple or conflicting representational systems, or indicate the spaces between these systems by positioning themselves or their work within them. Across the divergent contexts of apartheid South Africa, the stolen lands occupied by Australia and the United States (Turtle Island), and throughout the Chinese diaspora, women and queer artists have tactically intervened in marginalising or oppressive social and cultural orders by seizing and reconfiguring the signs, symbols, and even spaces that normally serve to validate their subjugation. The works created through processes of mediation are not only examples of reconciliation or juxtaposition—they just as often bring unexpected or irreconcilable elements into contact to imagine new ways of understanding and acting within particular locations. In “Creation Stories: Australian Arts Feminism”, Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore offer the term relationality to describe the multifaceted, albeit different, ways that Alisa O’Conner, Vivienne Binns, and Thancoupie grappled with complex identities, social, and cultural positions through their work. Revisiting key pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, the authors show how all three artists reworked dominant styles or materials to create subversive or counter meanings. O’Conner, a settler artist of Irish and Scottish heritage, integrated elements from post-WWII Australian social realism with locally specific images of Aboriginal, settler, and migrant women in Australia to develop a gender and race conscious Marxist-feminist aesthetic. In addition to bridging “high art” and bogan Aussie cultures through her use of found objects and raunchy motifs, Binns’ colourful paintings and assemblages radically transgressed

12  Jen Kennedy et al. social norms related to female sexuality. Thainakuith artist Thancoupie’s tile murals are material and symbolic records of Aboriginal women’s perseverance and resistance. In collaboration with her mother and aunt, she inscribed traditional stories into ceramics, a material that she adapted to create culturally significant representations. For Thancoupie and O’Conner, the mediating processes through which they created art objects also extended into their activist and community-based work which, in both cases, aimed to foster cross-cultural dialogues among youth. By beginning their paper with a land acknowledgement, Millner and Moore foreground the reality that any feminist actions or analyses within present-day Australia, including their own contribution to this book, are embedded in a colonial context. “Shades of Discrimination: The Emergence of Feminist Art in Apartheid South Africa” examines how artists Kim Siebert, Penny Siopsis, Sue Williamson, Marion Arnold, and Bongi Dhlomo negotiated state-sanctioned racism and deeply engrained sexism, as well as widespread misgivings about feminism within national liberation movements. As author Brenda Schmahmann explains, for numerous political, social, and cultural reasons, the term “feminism” was recognised as being incompatible with anti-racism and adopted by South African activists only after apartheid was dismantled in the early 1990s. A decade earlier, however, artists were already starting to strategically remix existing representational modes in ways that illuminated gender-based forms of discrimination and agency. Siebert collaged images of White middle-class women cut from 1950s lifestyle magazines into interiors decorated with “masterpieces” by American and European male modernists as well as objects that resemble basketry and beadwork made by isiXhosa and isiZulu speakers, to critically parody the gendered and racialised narrative of artistic modernism that she learned as an MFA student at the University of Capetown. Female genitalia and sugary confections blend together in the ambiguous shapes of Siopsis Embellishments, a thick, pink-hued painting embedded with tiny plastic ballerinas. Williamson appropriates well-known images of women leaders in the struggle against apartheid and sets them within decorative frames that reference devotional altarpieces, bridging the secular and sacred in homage to contemporary revolutionaries. Arnold’s 1980s watercolours brought a range of local, women-made Zimbabwean creative objects together in paint and were a visual analogue to the intersectional feminist art historical practice she was simultaneously developing in her position at the University of South Africa. Significantly, Dhlomo is the only Black artist discussed in this paper. As a result of the extensive systemic oppressions under apartheid, racism within the burgeoning White feminism, sexism within community arts projects, and structural prejudices in art history, she is one of few Black women from this period whose creative works were labelled “art”. 38 The linocuts she made while working at the African Art Centre in Durban during the early 1980s depict townships densely packed with shacks, tents, and silhouettes of people going about their daily lives. Although these works do not explicitly centre gender, the themes of forced displacement, community, and Black life in the built environments of state-led racism are undoubtedly feminist issues. 39 In his Expeditionary Series (also known as the East-Meets-West series), ChineseAmerican artist Tseng Kwong Chi used photography to subversively intervene within transnational discourses of Chineseness—which were fuelled by racism, sexism, xeno-, and homophobia—and, through this, to fashion his own queer identity in opposition to them. Beginning in 1979, Tseng travelled across the United States taking carefully staged photos of himself dressed in his signature grey Mao uniform at

Introduction 13 iconic tourist destinations. As Jane Chin Davidson argues in her essay “Tseng Kwong Chi: 1979 and the Liminal Trans of Racial and Sexual Politics”, the Mao suit was an internationally charged signifier at the time, with numerous conflicting meanings within and beyond the Chinese diaspora. By staging himself as the covertly queer “SlutforArt” (aka “Ambiguous Ambassador”) in this suit in relation to various monuments of American national identity, Tseng’s performative photography activated latent transnational and queer readings both of the suit and the sites he visited. Aided by his camera, a tool for mediating between the past and present, liveness and documentation, Tseng simultaneously worked with and against socially encoded scripts of Chineseness, masculinity, and femininity, replacing their representational norms with his own queer image.

Performing Among the many challenges to conventional modes of making and viewing that mark the timeframe of this anthology, performance art was among the most impactful. While performance is frequently heralded as an invention of twentieth-century European avant-garde movements such as Futurism and Dada, its disruption of passive spectatorship, erosion of the division between art and life, and use of the body as medium are tenets of cultural production that can be found outside the geographic, temporal, and cultural parameters drawn by Western-centric narratives.40 The essays in the third section of this book, Performing, examine artistic practices that reveal the failures of unidirectional and linear narrative models to capture the complexities of performance as it developed across various contexts around the world. The unique conditions under which Ana Mendieta, Jung Kang-Ja, Senga Nengudi, and Kirsten Justesen lived and worked resulted in distinct approaches to the performative within their respective practices. Throughout this section, bodies are used as material, concept, social construction, and interpretive framework. While these approaches illuminate the complex valences of performance and body art, they also work to destabilise the body as a coherent singular subject. The legibility of particular bodies within these categories is dependent on the context in which they are viewed, and the meanings conferred upon the race, class, sex, gender, and ability of a body within them. The intersubjective and inter-objective relations inhabited or performed by the artists in this section are forged between the bodies of the artists and their collaborators, both human and material. In her essay, “Against the Body: Interpreting Ana Mendieta”, Bryan-Wilson provides a historiographic analysis of the reception and historicisation of the artist’s performative practice. The often-contradictory interpretive frameworks that have been used to discuss Mendieta’s work have claimed for it a feminism that belies the artist’s ambivalent if not antagonist relationship to the mainstream White feminist circles through which she and her art circulated. Just as Ellen Y. Tani notes of Senga Nengudi, Mendieta’s race and gender have figured as overdetermining vectors of meaning that paradoxically mark her body as both explicit and universal, and her work as biographical and transcendent. As Bryan-Wilson makes clear, however, the numerous tactics used by the artist refuse singularity as they engage with the body as a site of violence, a mutable material, a memory, and an index, among other things. Shifting the locus of inquiry, Bryan-Wilson’s methodology asks not which iteration of the body is present within a particular work of art but, rather, which possibilities are made visible within the constraints of the interpretive logic imposed upon it?

14  Jen Kennedy et al. The interpretive framework used by Ellen Y. Tani to study Senga Nengudi’s artistic practice derives from the transnational nature of the work under consideration. Through her close study of the artist’s early career, Tani traces what she describes as the “cultural syncretism” of Afro-Asian ritual in a series of performative works, most notably in Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978). Citing Nengudi’s trip to Japan in 1966–1967, the author reads the ritual and ceremonial elements of Nengudi’s work as evidence of a conscious attempt to hybridise various elements of Japanese theatre traditions such as Kabuki and Noh Theatre with gestures that were culled from a matrix of influence including the iconography of the Black nationalist and Black Arts movements. The multiple contexts in which Nengudi was making and viewing art, which included Japan as well as Los Angeles and New York, cultivated the distinct Afro-Asian ritual elements that Tani identifies in a selection of the artist’s works. This aspect of Nengudi’s practice has been overlooked in part, the author argues, because of the essentialising patterns of reception “whose categorical boundaries presume a cultural practice defined by racial and gendered identity”. Similar to the ways that Mendieta’s immigrant identity has been positioned as secondary to her Cubanness, Nengudi’s work frequently has been measured against its ability to reflect her Blackness or not, as was more often believed to be the case. It is, these essays show, not only bodies that perform; the costumes, props, and sites that they interact with or alter do as well. Whether through Mendieta’s use of earth and blood or Nengudi’s manipulation of nylon, the properties of these materials forge relations of inter-objectivity that move beyond the notion of the body as medium. What Amelia Jones names reciprocity, rather than relationality, may better capture the methods of production discussed throughout the book in so far as the term insists on a mutual and anti-hierarchical exchange. 41 One of the feminist imperatives of performance shared by the artists addressed in this section is the ways corporeality is configured in relation to the materials that extend, surround, confine, or define the limits of the body. In her essay on the experimental innovations of Jung Kang-Ja, Phil Lee highlights the controversial Transparent Balloons and Nude (1968), the first performance featuring a nude woman in Korea. Organised by the experimental Shinjeon Group of which she was a member, Jung was violently disrobed by audience members before being covered in transparent balloons. The balloons, which became extensions of the artist’s recently exposed flesh, were then popped through the force of the bodies of her male collaborators as well as those of some audience members. The expansion and contraction of the balloons under the weight of the participants worked to dull the impact felt by Jung. When one was broken, however, the jarring noise and visibility of bare skin made audibly and visually palpable the metaphorical role that the bursting rubber played in the performance. While the relationship between Jung and those who participated in the performance by cutting off her clothes or throwing their bodies at hers with force is far from one of reciprocity, the inter-objective relation between Jung’s body and the balloons could be characterised as such. Yielding and skin-like, the materiality of the balloons shares traits with the body onto which they were fixed and with which they are subjected to acts of violence. Lee’s essay explores Jung’s use of her body in various collaborative contexts noting the ways it is read distinctly from its differently sexed counterparts even when engaged in similar acts as in Murder at the Han Riverside (1968). Languishing in the perceived salaciousness of public nudity, media coverage of the events reserved

Introduction 15 any recognition of innovation or conceptual novelty to the male artists involved and relegated Jung’s role to one of narcissistic exhibitionism or insanity. Through contemporaneous and subsequent critical reception of Jung’s work and that of the Shinjeon Group generally, Lee traces the sociocultural visibility of bodies as performing subjects within the Korean context as well as in the broader art historical literature from which they are likewise absented. Like Lee’s assertion of Jung’s role as a pioneer of body art, Tania Ørum describes Kirsten Justesen as one of the first practitioners of the genre in Denmark. Performing the objectivity of her body in relation to multiple mediums, Justesen’s work engaged directly with the feminist activist communities of which she was a part. The reciprocal modalities within her widely varied practice, therefore, can be located between Justesen and her collaborators, materials, and the larger publics with which many of the works engage. As a member of the Danish arts collective Kanonklubben, Justesen helped execute alternative exhibitions and participated in the staging of a series of performative tableaux titled Damebilleder (Images of Women) (1970) which coincided with the first feminist march through the city of Copenhagen. Ørum emphasises that Justesen used her body as a “tool”, an assertion of objecthood that inverts the power dynamic through which the objectification of feminised bodies is frequently enacted. Justesen’s activation of her body in relation to multiple mediums including sculpture, film, and photography interrogates objectivity as state of being, a performative act, as well as an art historical fact for which the conditions of possibility or impossibility depend upon the contextually specific meanings embedded in the materials and processes involved. Objecthood, in other words, is not understood as a one-dimensional position of submission or subordination to be challenged but, rather, as a state of being that is shaped by relations of power with the potential to generate reciprocal, coalitional, and collective relationships.

Common Differences Beyond artistic processes, many connections can be made between the essays and across the sections in this volume. Photography, for example, was an integral part of Justesen, Mendieta, Vater, and Tseng’s performative works. The 60s and 70s saw photographic practices expand dramatically: while cameras were mobilised by activists around the world as a tool that helped catalyse political and social change, artists began to use them to disrupt or détourn mass media and documentary forms. During these years, photography became an important strategy for laying bare the structures of representation. More than documentation, the camera operates as an extension of performance in Justesen’s Sculpture I & II, Mendieta’s tableaux, and Vater’s Nós. In Tseng’s Expeditionary Series, both the material of the photograph, the substrate, and its documentary capture are central to the work. Other artists in the volume rely on photography to document their evanescent processes. In different ways, Nengudi and Vicuña used photography as an archival lens through which historians can access and account for their ephemeral practices, which, by their nature, upset the fixed linearity of the art historical field. Another route through the essays traces artistic movements as they unfold across different geographical and political contexts. For example, the unique cultural, social, and political sites within which Jung, Nengudi, and Vater’s happenings occurred

16  Jen Kennedy et al. delineated their formal and conceptual parameters. These same artists, along with Vicuña, were also involved in practices of public art and site specificity. In post-independence Korea, Jung’s happenings were among the first works to move art out of reified exhibition spaces and into public spaces such as cafés and the street. In Nengudi’s Freeway Fets, the space beneath an overpass in Downtown LA became a stage for the production of an Afro-Asian inspired collaborative performance. By presenting her participatory work, Nós, in the busy Praça Nossa Senhora da Paz in Ipanema, Brazil, Vater was able to circumvent state censors and pass the politically charged project off as a “day of fun”. Vicuña’s furling and unfurling spirals constructed on the beach of Concón on the Pacific coast of Chilé were more solitary engagements, presented largely only to the natural world. By referencing the tents of nomadic Turkmen tribes of Southern Antolia, Yalter’s Round House sculpture presents the object itself as a site, transferable from location to location. Artists’ and curators’ positions in relation to institutions large and small, from museums and galleries to community art centres, activist circles, and universities, is another connection between essays. These different orientations bring the impact that institutions have on artists’ ability to work, as well as on the larger communities with which their practices are engaged, into sharp focus. When placed in the context of the exhibition at Citadel Hall in Halifax, NS, for example, Margaret Johnson’s ribbon skirt intervened in celebratory narratives of Canadian nation-building. Many of the artists discussed in this book were critical of art institutions, strategically working within and against them to disrupt their exclusionary mechanisms. Siebert’s collage What did your mother ever tell you about the Hard Edge School? critiques the Euro-centric and male-dominated narratives of modern art that were taught at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The critical reception of Binns’ hilarious and sexually expressive works makes evident the illegibility of her practice within traditional arts institutions, which deemed her art subversive even in relation to the counter cultural arts community in New South Wales, Australia. Many other possible routes through this book will doubtless be identified by its readers.

Locating and Dislocating Feminisms The production of feminist art histories, as Victoria Horne and Amy Tobin describe it, is a “strategically adopted political position from which to write”.42 A feminist position, as bell hooks reminds us, however, is not one that is passively occupied but is enacted.43 Accounting for the “from where” from which one writes and makes is at the heart of this anthology and, as such, necessitates an acknowledgement of the intellectual and creative labour that has informed our thinking. Our contribution is situated alongside the work of countless feminist art historians, an unstable and mobile locatedness that suits Griselda Pollock’s description of this kind of work as ongoing feminist interventions in art history rather than the construction of a singular feminist art history.44 Most, although not all, of the authors and the editors are writing from and/or have been trained within the anglosphere. Despite the transnational content of this anthology, the discourses with which it is engaged remain dominated by English-language debates and interests, a limitation of the project that we openly acknowledge.

Introduction 17 Often cited as a foundational text of feminist art history, Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971) called upon critics and historians to “pierce cultural-ideological limitations” which included the gendered mythologies that position White male subjectivity at the centre of the field’s lines of inquiry.45 Numerous biographical studies of women artists appeared shortly thereafter and, by 1976, Nochlin herself had collaborated with Ann Sutherland Harris to plan Women Artists 1550–1950, the first international exhibition of its kind. Taking up Nochlin’s challenge to patriarchal notions of “greatness”, authors such as Norma Broude, Carol Duncan, Mary Garrard, Germaine Greer, and Lisa Tickner persisted in interrogating the criterion by which the value or viability of art was being measured.46 To be sure, Nochlin’s essay opened a productive, although at times contentious, exchange between a growing field of art critics and scholars with the shared goal of reshaping, if not dismantling, the discipline.47 Posing new questions regarding the gendering of art history, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (1981) posited a deconstructive rather than an evaluative methodology to offer “not a history of women artists”, as they explain, but rather “an analysis of the relations between women, art, and ideology”.48 This first generation of feminist art historical texts, as well as countless others not mentioned here, were shaped by the sociopolitical activism of the women’s movements from within which they were penned and, as the essays in this anthology make clear, were beginning to provide language and methodologies for understanding artistic practices that were already enacting the feminist politics that this ever evolving discourse seeks to describe. The priorities and perspectives of this initial moment in feminist art historiography, however, were overwhelmingly White and Euro-American-centric, a fact that was observed fairly early on by many artists and writers including Lucy Lippard (1995), Trinh T. Minh-ha (1991, 2009), Ella Shohat (2001), and Judith Wilson-Pates (1988), among others. This book is deeply indebted to this formative moment and joins the expanding network of fellow feminist scholars who continue to pose new questions and challenges regarding the critical reception and historicising of art. Integral, yet still not yet fully recognised as foundational to the discipline, intersectional feminist analyses of art have been particularly important to our continued efforts to recognise the relationship of our work and our privilege as authors to whiteness. To this end, Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, Lisa Bloom, Aruna D’Souza, Lisa Farrington, María Fernández, Jennifer González, Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, Margo Machida, Uri McMillan, Kymberly Pinder, and Michele Wallace are among the thinkers whose work has most vociferously called upon art histories and their authors to account for the persisting racism of the artworld while offering up alternative models for thinking, writing, curating, and making. The writings of artists have also been crucial to efforts to decolonise art history, among which Coco Fuso, Adrian Piper, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Lorraine O’Grady are just a few. We also need to recognise the equally paradigm-shifting work of Amelia Jones, Catherine Lord, José Esteban Muñoz, B. Rudy Rich and a host of others whose insights and articulations regarding queer visibility, subjectivity, and modes of knowledge production have been integral to denaturalising the heteronormativity and transphobic operations of art and its institutions.

18  Jen Kennedy et al. In Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985, as in Marsha Meskimmon, Maura Reilly, Ella Shohat, and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s formative work, the literature on transnational feminist theory outlined above has been brought into dialogue with art historical narratives both past and present. A critical examination of the impacts of capitalist globalisation structures the art historical analyses of Arjun Appadurai, Angela Dimirakaki, Anne Peterson Ring, and Gayatri Gopinath, among others. These authors constitute a small part of a long lineage of work often informed by a Marxist-feminist critique that has accounted for the ways capitalism’s structural and ideological systems have resulted in patterns in the movement of bodies, goods, and ideas that persist in violently asserting imperialist imperatives. Many art historians who carefully account for the colonial structures of capitalism have done so through the logic of post- and decolonial theory, foregrounding the practices and conditions of production within migratory, immigrant, and diasporic communities. These issues are discussed at great length in Essays in Migratory Aesthetics (2012) as well as Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture (2012), and, in this volume, are particularly evident in Ellen Y. Tani, Ceren Özpınar, and Jane Chin Davidson’s contributions.

This Anthology Seeks to Open up a Field of Inquiry Not to Define it We started this project in 2015 inspired by the debates and subsequent shifts within art history discussed above and motivated by our collective need for a book like this one to support and situate our individual research on different national and transnational histories of feminist art. When we began formulating our ideas for this collection, we were looking for ways to pull together, even tentatively, some of the “scattered genealogies”49 that shape the field in which we are working. However, after much deliberation, we decided not to include our individual research in this volume because, for us, the process of editing it was primarily about learning from some of the other emerging and established scholars working at the intersection of transnational feminist praxis and the histories of feminist art. The fact that we had all just defended or were just about to defend our dissertations was one of many reasons that we did not know whether we were the best people to tackle this project. Yet we decided to pursue it partly because, despite searching, we could not find any other transnational studies focusing specifically on these critical decades in feminist art. What we felt intuitively then and understand with certainty now is that no single project will exhaust the potentiality of this topic. Over the past five years, the publication of many of the outstanding texts on contemporary feminist art and globalisation, diaspora, and immigration cited throughout this introduction have not only helped us formulate and refine the framework for this book but also, just as importantly, have illuminated its limitations. Some of these we have tried to flag, although there are unquestionably others that go unacknowledged. As we have come to understand it, transnational feminist scholarship is operating at its best when its function is not to validate its own contribution, but when it helps others identify new lines of inquiry. In this spirit, we offer this volume both as a sample of dynamic and diverse perspectives on feminism and art between 1960 and 1985 and as evidence of how much more work remains to be done.

Introduction 19

Notes 1 Some particularly helpful sources on the topic of art and activism between 1960 and 1985 include: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010); J. Keri Cronin and Kirsty Robertson, eds., Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011); Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, eds., Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (Los Angeles, CA: Hammer Museum; New York, NY: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017); Rujeko Hockley & Catherine Morris, eds., We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, New Perspectives (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2018); Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazilian Art in the 1970s (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016); T.V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in Post-1968 Mexico City (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). 2 The entrenched narratives to which we refer are those that position cultural production from outside of the United States and Europe as well as that which is produced within marginalized communities as peripheral or reactionary, if not entirely illegible as art. The geography of the “west” is traced according to colonial power structures that have not only excluded entire territories and cultures from the art historical record but also have not accounted for the multidirectional movement of people, ideas, and materials across borders. 3 Many scholars and curators have contributed to debates about whether the term feminism is applicable and appropriate across a range of contexts. See, for example, Keti Chukhrov, “Introduction,” in Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology, ed. Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2018), 273–277; Cornelia Butler, “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria,” in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2007), 15–16; and Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 111–114; Aruna D’Souza, “The Fourth World and the Second Wave: On (Non)Encounters Between Native Women and Feminism” in Art for New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, ed. Mindy N. Besaw, Candice Hopkins, and Manuela Well-Off-Man (Fayetteville, NC: The University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 63–73. Addressing similar debates in relation to contemporary art, Amelia Jones coined the term “parafeminism” to describe a “model of critique and exploration that it simultaneously parallel to and building on (in the sense of rethinking and pushing the boundaries of, but not superseding) earlier feminisms”. See Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 213. 4 We want to thank Marsha Meskimmon for encouraging us to incorporate this definition of transnational in our introduction. 5 Chandra Mohanty uses the term “common differences” to describe connections and solidarities that do not diminish the many disparities and particularities within and between local and transnational communities. She argues that “In knowing differences and particularities, we can better see the connections and commonalities because no border is ever complete or rigidly determining...The challenge is to see how differences allow us to explain the connections and border crossings better and more accurately”. Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 505. Similarly, Maylei Blackwell’s “unaligned geographies of difference” names “how actors from different social and structural locations engage in collective political action, and how they account for and negotiate power differentials”. Maylei Blackwell, Laura Briggs, and Mignonette Chiu, “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 36 no. 3 (2015): 7. Our understanding of the relationship between commonalities and differences, solidarities and conflicts that may exist simultaneously, is rooted in these theories.

20  Jen Kennedy et al. 6 These are just some of the issues that been brought to the fore by the growing number of scholars who are working on transnational feminist artistic practices. Some notable examples of work on this area that focus primarily on the post-1989 period include: Ella Shohat, ed., Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminisms in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1998); Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds., Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (London and New York: Merrell, 2007); Trinh T. Minh-ha., Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe, eds., Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experiences (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Anne Ring Peterson, Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalised World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Jennifer González, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega, and Terezita Romo, eds., Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Katy Deepwell, ed., Feminist Art and Artivisms (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020); Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001). The first volume in Marsha Meskimmon’s Transnational Feminisms and the Arts Trilogy, Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), includes a discussion of Joan Brassil’s work in the 1970s in addition to examining transnational feminist practices from the 1980s to the present. Texts exploring transnational feminist art before 1989 include: Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Griselda Pollock, ed., Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996); Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed., WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007); Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, eds., Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2017); Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, eds., We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85/A Sourcebook (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2017) and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85/New Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek, eds., A Companion Guide to Feminist Art (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019); Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in in New York (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005). The series Rethinking Art’s Histories edited by Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon for Manchester University Press is a leader in publishing and promoting expanded approaches to the discipline and foregrounds transnational queer and feminist perspectives. 7 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” GLQ, Vol. 7 no. 4 (2001): 673–679. 8 Maylei Blackwell, Laura Briggs, and Mignonette Chiu’s “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (2015) offers several perspectives on the development of transnational feminisms as a field. 9 Jacqui M. Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). The primary critique of global sisterhood centers on the phrase and its mobilizations homogenizing effects. The elisions and erasures of differences across cultural, geographic, temporal, and political contexts as well as race, class, sex, ability, and other differences that are enacted in the name of forging sisterhood across difference risks a violent essentialism that continues to privilege white middle-class experiences, knowledges, and world-views over those of others. For more on the critique of “global sisterhood” see: Caren Kaplan, “The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Kaplan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 137–152.

Introduction 21 10 Blackwell, Briggs, and Chiu, “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable,” 5; Maylei Blackwell, “Triple Jeopardy: The Third World Women’s Alliance and the Transnational Roots of Women-of-Color Feminisms,” in Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought, ed. Susan Bordo, Cristina Alcade, and Ellen Rosenmen (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 281–291. 11 For more on the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference and its related activities, see Kathleen Gough Aberle, “An Indochinese conference in Vancouver,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 3 no. 3–4 (Summer/Fall 1971): 2–29; Anonymous, “Chicanas Attend Vancouver Conference,” La Verdad, no. 28 (May 1971): 14; Judy Tzu-Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 193–265; Blackwell, “Triple Jeopardy.” 12 See: Combahee River Collective, “Collective Statement,” reprinted in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), 15–27; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989):139–168; Deborah King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, Vol. 14 no. 1 (Fall 1988): 42–72. 13 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Press, 2017). 14 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands-La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Book, 1987). 15 Aruna D’Souza, “Introduction,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, ed. Jill Casid and Aruna D’Souza (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), vii. 16 Some of the most prominent voices in the discussion over art history’s potentially inextricable relationship to cultural imperialism include David Carrier, James Elkins, and Keith Moxey. See: David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park, PA: Penn State University, 2009); James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (New York and London: Routledge, 2007); Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The History in Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013) and Ella Shohat, “Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, Vol. 26 no. 4 (Summer 2001): 1269–1272. 17 Some examples of art historical texts that challenge the conventional mappings of modern and contemporary art history include Celina Jeffery and Gregory Minissale, eds., Global & Local Art Histories (New Castle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visona, eds., A Companion to Modern African Art (Chichester, UK: John & Wiley & Sons, 2013). Please also see the Museum of Modern Art’s ongoing publication series, Primary Documents, organized by its International Program. Each volume is dedicated to a particular critic or region outside of Euro-America and offers English translations of primary resources like manifestos, artists’ writings, correspondence, and criticism. 18 Meskimmon, Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art, 3–4. 19 Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, eds., Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 1. 20 In addition to Lock Swarr and Nagar, see Chandra Mohanty and Jacqui M. Alexander’s extensive collaborative work; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 1994); Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Grace Kyungwon Hong and Rodrick A. Ferguson, ed. Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011); and Susan Bordo, M. Cristina Alcade, and Ellen Rosenman, ed. Provocations: A Transnational Reader in Feminist Thought (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), among many other examples.

22  Jen Kennedy et al. 21 Our use of the term “Otherwise” is borrowed from Amelia Jones and Erin Silver eds. Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 22 In June 2020, No Neutral Alliance (Nure Collective, CTRL+SHIFT Collective, as well as a number of individual artists and arts workers) published an open letter addressing racism at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The same month, the group #DismantalNoMA issued a letter calling on the New Orleans Museum of Art to redress its culture of racist discrimination and a letter signed by “The Curatorial Department” spoke out against deep seated discriminatory practices at the Guggenheim Museum. These letters, among numerous others, have illuminated some of the many ways that racism is entrenched in arts institutions, including universities. For a longer history of structural racism and anti-racist activism in arts institutions in the United States, see: Aruna D’Souza, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (New York, NY: Badlands, 2028) and Susan Cahan, Mounting Frustration: Art Museums in the Age of Black Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 23 H.J. Kim-Puri, “Conceptualizing Gender-Sexuality-State-Nation, An Introduction,” Gender and Society, Vol. 19 no. 2 (April 2005): 137. 24 Blackwell, Briggs, and Chiu, “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable,” 3. 25 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, Society, Vol. 1 no. 1 (2012): 1–40. 26 We are not the first to highlight that the “global turn” and efforts to internationalize art history are inextricably tied to global capitalism and its effects on higher education. Aruna D’Souza and Marsha Meskimmon have both written eloquently about the challenges and complexity of projects like this one, which are embedded in the very field they seek to interrogate and even resist. See: D’Souza, “Introduction,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, vii–xxiii and Marsha Meskimmon, “Introduction: Knowing, Imagining, and Inhabiting Earth-Wide and Otherwise,” in Transversal Politics and Art, 5–6. While the vast majority of texts on transnational feminisms address their double-edged relationship to globalization, some particularly thoughtful analyses include: Blackwell, Briggs, and Chiu, “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable”; Suzanne Bergeron, “Political Economy Discourses and Feminist Politics,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 26 no. 4 (2001): 983– 1006; Janet M. Conway, “Troubling Transnational Feminism(s): Theorizing Activist Praxis,” Feminist Theory, Vol. 18 no. 2 (2017): 205–227; and Vrushali Patil, “From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38 no. 4 (2013): 847–867. 27 Blackwell, Briggs, and Chiu, “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable,” 10. 28 Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986), 213. The politics of location has been both a generative concept, and important point of debate, for several scholars of transnational feminisms, including Maylei Blackwell, Marsha Meskimmon, Chandra Mohanty, and Peta Hinton, among others. For us, this essay is as important methodologically as it is conceptually. It reflects Rich’s reckoning with her own earlier work, which has been critiqued for its essentialist and homogenizing effects, as much as it is an appeal to her readers to challenge these tendencies within feminism. 29 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006). 30 There is a broad body of scholarship that foregrounds the affective, embodied, and haptic as ways of knowing as well as a mode through which one engages with art making and viewing. Some examples include: Rosemary Betterton, Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body (New York and London: Routledge, 1996); Peggy Phelan, “The Returns of Touch: Feminist Performances, 1960–80,” in WACK! Art & the Feminist Revolution, 346–361; Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994); Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota

Introduction 23













Press, 2002); Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art & Performance (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015); and Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 31 Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 106. 32 Ibid., 76–77. 33 Ibid., 78. 34 This understanding of identity was primarily developed within the field of queer theory. See for example: William C. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Diana Fuss, The Identification Papers (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); José Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) and Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 35 The language of positionality appears in much of Amelia Jones’ writings on feminist art. For one example, see: Jones, “Multiculturalism, Intersectionality, and ‘Post-Identity’,” in Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification in the Visual Arts (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 117–169. 36 Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anti-Capitalist Struggles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28 no. 2 (Winter 2003): 514. 37 E-mail correspondence between the co-editors and Aruna D’Souza, 31 July 2020. 38 Gladys Mgudlandlu and Helen Sebidi are two older Black female artists who also gained some recognition during apartheid in South Africa. They both explored themes of gender in their work. Mgudlandlu passed away in 1979. Sebidi remains active today. 39 For a discussion of the stake of identifying particular issues as feminist see Rosalyn Deutsche, Aruna D’Souza, Miwon Kwon, Ulrike Müller, Mignon Nixon, and Senam Okudzeto, “Feminist Time: A Conversation,” Grey Room, no. 31 (Spring 2008): 32–67. 40 Some examples of histories of performance art that decentre the West as an origin of the practice, include, Thomas Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher, 2007); Coco Fusco, ed., Corpus Delecti: Performance of the Americas (New York and London: Routledge, 1999); Anne Marsh, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969–1992 (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1993). 41 Amelia Jones, “The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History,” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 20–22. 42 Victoria Horne and Amy Tobin, “An Unfinished Revolution in Art Historiography, or How to Write a Feminist Art History,” Feminist Review, Vol. 107 no. 1 (2014): 76. 43 bell hooks, “Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression” in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), 18–33. 44 Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Interventions in Art’s Histories,” in Art History and Its Methods, ed. Eric Fernie (London: Phaidon, 1995), 296–313. Similarly, artist Mary Kelly rejects the term “feminist art” in favor of the phrase “art informed by feminism”, while Lisa Tickner had used the descriptive “feminist problematic in art history” to name her approach. See interview with Kelly in Mignon Nixon, ed., Mary Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 75; and Lisa Tickner, “Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference,” Genders, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 92–93. 45 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” in Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, eds. Barbara Moran and Vivian Gornick (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 481. 46 See: Carol Duncan, “When Greatness is a Box of Wheaties,” Artforum, Vol. 14 no. 2 (October 1975): 60–64; Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979); Lisa Tickner, “The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Works, by Germaine Greer, Review” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 1 no. 2 (Fall 1980, Winter 1981): 64–69.

24  Jen Kennedy et al. 47 In a 1978 panel at the annual College Art Association conference in New York titled “Questioning the Litany: Feminist Views in Art History,” co-chairs H. Diane Russell and Mary D. Garrard facilitated discussions that have become formative to feminist art history and which instigated the publication of the anthology Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), co-edited by Garrard and Norma Broude. 48 Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London: Harper Collins, 1981), 132–133. 49 The phrase “scattered genealogies” is homage to Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s important anthology, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices.

Part 1

Constructing

1

Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt Reclamation, Resilience, and Resistance Lisa Binkley

Introduction In a 1968 exhibition organised by Citadel Hill National Historic Site in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Dr Margaret Johnson, a member of Eskasoni First Nation, displayed a handstitched ribbon skirt as part of an installation featuring cultural dress associated with the province’s diverse heritage. The 1856 Stone Fort, first established in 1749 as a strategically positioned British military post, was built overlooking the city in defence of advancing threats from foreign incursions from the Atlantic Ocean and inland from the Mi’kmaq. It is not precisely known if Johnson was commissioned by the Historic Site to make and display this ceremonial dress for this particular exhibition; however, it was accessioned into the permanent collection at Citadel Hill, and was later acquired by the Nova Scotia Museum in 1982. Johnson’s ribbon skirt is a form of ceremonial regalia worn by Indigenous women from across Turtle Island that represents matriarchal knowledges regarding femininity, fertility, and equality. Ribbon skirts crafted from manufactured textiles have been made by Indigenous women since the nineteenth century, commonly replacing ceremonial dress previously constructed from animal hide following the extinction of some species, such as buffalo, and the increased availability of cloth. This transition to the use of manufactured cloth in ceremonial regalia coincides with a shift towards aggressive nationalist assimilation policies during the nineteenth century in Canada. The display of Johnson’s ribbon skirt at Citadel Hill followed her participation as a basketmaker at three exhibitions celebrating Canada’s centennial anniversary in 1967. As an exhibitor, Johnson’s status as an Indigenous woman and Elder factored significantly within each exhibition, and her creative productions were purposeful articulations of a matriarchal worldview within a mainstream heteropatriarchal forum. The exhibitions in which Johnson displayed her work followed a series of Government of Canada inquiries held during the 1960s, a period of intense cultural and social change, situating the artist within a larger sphere of government-driven nationalist objectives. The first two of these inquiries, the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism (1963) and the Hawthorn Report (1966–1967), focused on the state of diverse peoples, reinforcing the idea of Canadian identity within a framework of French and English settler-culture, which consequently added to the further marginalisation of immigrants and Indigenous peoples. A second set of inquiries, the White Paper (1969) and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1970), reasserted assimilation processes that sought to fold Indigenous culture into the mainstream, ultimately casting aside any notion of Indigenous matriarchal worldviews. Together,

28  Lisa Binkley the series of inquiries and the centennial celebrations fostered a form of neo-nationalism, contributing to conflicts within an expanding multicultural society. Close analysis of Johnson’s regalia as material culture and her participation in the centennial celebrations through the lenses of Native Feminist Theories reveals how tension between matriarchal worldviews and heteropatriarchal ideologies fostered momentum for further legal and political action by Indigenous women. Native Feminist Theorists, such as Renya Ramirez, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Eve Tuck, Karyn Recollet, Leanne Simpson, and Leilani Sabzalian, to name only a few, have developed a consciousness of Native feminism through disciplinary lenses such as Feminism, Curriculum Studies, English, and Sociology, complicating our understandings of Indigeneity and gender rights over the past two decades. For the most part, it has been realised that Indigenous women have been mobilised by the challenges with which they are confronted, and are empowered by their Native feminism to navigate the dominant environments in which they live.1 As noted by Eve Tuck and Karyn Recollet, “Heteropatriarchy works to place men at the top of many power structures, but it also works to strictly define what counts as ‘man’ and what counts as ‘woman’”. 2 As such, an existing dominant worldview denies any existence of an alternative cosmology, especially one that situates women as integral and equal members of society, as is the case in Indigenous societies. To accomplish a restored matriarchal worldview, Indigenous women have pursued various opportunities to reinterpret and articulate ideas that disrupt heteropatriarchal situations by using appropriate forms of language.3 This concept is explained by Mareike Neuhaus, who outlines the need for “reading strategies that allow us to ground our readings of Indigenous texts in Indigenous discourse traditions but without compromising the important political, historical, social, intellectual, and other contexts from which these texts emerge”.4 That is, Neuhaus encourages a renewed understanding of Indigeneity through the use of particular languages that more accurately interpret meaning and intervene in colonial systems and, at the same time, account for any contemporaneous influences that shape understandings. For Johnson, the display of her regalia at Citadel Hill, following her participation in various national centennial celebrations, allowed her to activate her experiences and circumstances as a form of empowerment. Her articulation of Native feminism was followed by the actions of two Tobique First Nations women, Jeannette Lavell and Yvonne Bédard, who appealed to the United Nations after being denied the reinstatement of their Indigenous rights under Section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act in front of the Supreme Court of Canada. Johnson’s contribution to the Citadel Hill exhibition must be seen within the context of neo-national narratives, government-driven enquiries, and emerging Indigenous voices of the 1960s, such as those of Lavell and Bédard. By situating her work in this historical, social, and political context, this chapter contributes to a growing body of Native Feminist Theories and seeks to broaden the understanding of Indigenous women’s resilience and resistance.

Ceremonial Dress and Traditional Teachings as Matriarchal Knowledgeways Dr Margaret “Granny” Johnson’s skirt as material culture reflects “the hardships, the struggles, the triumphs, the growth, and humour” of its maker (Fig. 1.1).5 To museum visitors, “Dr Granny” was a storyteller, a talented artist, and a leader, who

Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt 29

Figure 1.1  Dr Margaret Johnson, ribbon skirt, c. late 1960s to early 1970s, polyester, cotton, beads. Courtesy of the Nova Scotia Museum.

continues to be recognised for her contributions to the Mi’kmaw nation. Above all, she is celebrated for her role in “keeping the Mi’kmaw culture alive by passing on traditions such as language, prayer, dance, song, and Waltes”, an ancient game of numbers.6 Moreover, she is remembered as an Elder, who passed on the teachings of her Elders and the women from whom she would have learned as she made her ribbon skirt. Few details exist about the making and circulation of Dr Johnson’s ribbon skirt. It is not known, for example, whether she wore the skirt for ceremony before it was installed at Citadel Hill, or if she made it specifically for display as part of the exhibition.7 Through her method of making, selection of ribbons, the practice

30  Lisa Binkley of hand-stitching, and sharing of teachings, Johnson embedded Mi’kmaw matriarchal knowledges through the object, its fibres, and its circulation. The spirit of these knowledges connects her to other women in her community, across Mi’kma’ki and across Turtle Island. Johnson’s regalia is part of a cultural legacy and embodies matriarchal Mi’kmaw spirituality and femininity. Before ribbon skirts were made of cloth, and prior to the decimation of the buffalo as well as the introduction of manufactured textiles in the Midwest, ceremonial dress was made from animal hides that were fleshed and tanned, a process that separated fat and fur from skin. Through the making and wearing of ceremonial dress from tanned hide, which was sometimes embellished with shells, feathers, quills, and wampum beads, women connected their spirits to Mother Earth, paying homage to Creator through dance. As part of ceremony, dancers wore regalia that included a fringed edge along the bottom of the skirt that, when worn by a dancer, rubbed along the grass and stimulated regrowth.8 Spiritual and traditional knowledges have been passed on from grandmother to mother to daughter and shared between community members through ceremonial dressmaking and wearing, nurturing the vital connections between Indigenous women and matriarchal knowledges. Some of the central teachings of women’s regalia and, in particular, ribbon skirts, focus on women’s vitality and the importance of biological and reproductive roles.9 For example, the skirt’s A-line design, which extends from a woman’s waist to the area above the ground, shares the same contours and values as a teepee. Both the skirt and the teepee are viewed as spiritual and emphasise the sacredness of the space within their frames.10 Customarily, skirts are worn “during sweats, fasts, full moon ceremonies, first menstruation rituals, and the coming of age that celebrates women’s fertility and the transitions to adulthood”.11 These fundamental values and practices are sustained through traditional teachings and offer guidance and insight to makers as they continue to make skirts for ceremony.

Textiles and Making as Resilience and Reclamation In addition to the traditional teachings that have continued to be passed on over time, the availability of new fabrics and supplies acquired through trade augmented the meaning embedded in regalia for makers. During the nineteenth century, the introduction of wool cloth and silk ribbons, through global trade routes, replaced hide in the making of regalia. It is unknown precisely when manufactured textiles replaced hide; however, the “first recorded instance of ribbonwork appliqué was on a Menominee wedding dress made in 1802”.12 Often ceremonial dress was made with woollen stroud cloth and ribbons exchanged through trade posts by French traders as early as the mid-eighteenth century. In a 1761 trade ledger recorded at Fort Michilimackinac, stroud cloth is identified as an item commonly traded for beaver pelts; at the time, two yards of stroud was recorded as equivalent to four beavers.13 Originating in Stroud, England, British stroud cloth was recognised for the sophistication of its felting process and thus its warmth, vibrant red or black colours, and the volume in which it was traded between the British and Indigenous peoples. Indigenous textile historian Cory Wilmott argues that British-sourced stroud cloth was evidently superior to that which was emerging from manufacturers in the American Midwest.14 For this reason, the stroud cloth acquired by Indigenous peoples and used in the making of regalia during the nineteenth century is directly linked to colonial processes

Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt 31 resulting from transactions between the Northwest and Hudson Bay Companies and fur trade consumers. Therefore, the shift to cloth and, more specifically, woollen stroud for regalia reflects a certain period in time when Indigenous makers were simultaneously adapting to the use of manufactured cloth and negotiating an aggressive agenda towards the assimilation and extinction of Indigenous peoples in Canada. In 1870, when Rupert’s Land was acquired by the nascent Dominion of Canada from the Hudson Bay Company, the expanded Province of Manitoba was established.15 As part of the government’s settlement strategies, they orchestrated the decimation of the buffalo for the purpose of minimising the availability of food, shelter, and clothing to the communities who occupied those territories. Between 1874 and 1886, the Government of Canada pursued various strategies in efforts to reinforce its stronghold on the prairies and affirm its position towards the assimilation of Indigenous peoples across Canada. These strategies included: a survey of the prairies between 1874 and 1878; the inception of the Indian Act, 1876; and the establishment of the transcontinental railway completed in 1885. To reinforce its position, the Canadian government issued the Potlatch Ban in 1885 and established Indian Residential Schools in 1886. In Mi’kma’ki, stroud cloth is associated with Indigenous regalia and military dress, the legacies of the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725, 1751, and 1752, and is imbued, therefore, with the living memory of colonisation, violence, and mistrust. An 1864 photographic portrait of Mi’kmaw artist Mali Kristia’n Po’l features the model in her regalia, a ribbon skirt, jacket, and peak cap. Although it is not possible to distinguish whether the fabric in this particular ribbon skirt was in fact stroud woollen cloth, another skirt made by P’ol and currently held by the Nova Scotia Museum is made from woollen stroud and silk ribbon (Fig. 1.2). Stroud cloth was widely available at retail outlets in Halifax, as it was at trading posts across the Canadian Provinces, and was also used in British military uniforms. Viewed in terms of this particular textile, the relationship between the Mi’kmaq and the military extends back to the establishment of Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725 and their further ratification in 1751 and 1752, following the arrival of British military officer and aristocrat, Edward Cornwallis (b. 1713), and his horrific proclamation that offered a bounty on Mi’kmaq heads.16 The Peace and Friendship Treaties were established as “solemn agreements that set out long-standing promises, mutual obligations, and benefits for both parties”, including the preservation of traditional hunting and fishing practices, and respect for the laws that governed the relationship.17 However, a legacy of mistrust sustained through a series of legal opportunities taken by the government reinforced its own interpretation of the Peace and Friendship Treaties. A significant decision by the courts in 1929 resulted in the conviction of elected Mi’kmaw Grand Chief Gabriel Sylliboy for possessing pelts out of season while outside of his home community of Whycocomagh. Although this decision was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1985 and Sylliboy was issued an apology by the government posthumously, the legacy of the original court interpretation of the Peace and Friendship Treaties loomed large for almost six decades. In the years that Johnson made and displayed her regalia, the results of Sylliboy’s 1929 conviction informed the Mi’kmaq of the injustices of the judicial environment, which they were forced to navigate. By the time Margaret Johnson made her ribbon skirt for display at Citadel Hill in 1968, it would have been through a process of reclamation. In 1968, Dr Granny

32  Lisa Binkley

Figure 1.2  Mali Kristia’n Po’l, ribbon skirt, c. 1864, woollen stroud and silk ribbon. Courtesy of the Nova Scotia Museum.

was forty-three years old and had lived most of her life understanding the power entrenched in the ideological world in which she lived. She was thirteen years old when Gabriel Sylliboy was charged under the Nova Scotia Lands and Forests Act for the illegal possession of pelts and thirty-nine years old when he died. Furthermore, she would not have had the opportunity to legally experience traditional ceremony until she was sixteen years old, in 1951, following the reversal of a provision in the Indian Act that finally made it possible for Indigenous peoples across Canada to re-engage in ceremonial practice, participate in large gatherings, and wear regalia. Together the awareness that Sylliboy died a convicted man under the provisions of the Canadian court system’s interpretation of the Treaty and the reversal of ceremonial prohibition would have had a profound influence on Johnson’s knowledge and place in society as a young Mi’kmaw woman. The ban on ceremonial rights had originally been terminated in 1884, along with the Potlatch Ban, an action that was later reaffirmed in 1925 under an amendment to the Indian Act.18 During these decades of ceremonial prohibition, practices in many communities were lost, while other ceremonial teachings were driven underground to avoid detection and the risk of incarceration by Indian Agents. While some traditions and oral histories, in addition

Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt 33 to languages and practices, were lost; others were maintained, often under the cloak of darkness or when Indian Agents were absent from the reserves. Additionally, some were resurrected through oral history telling and through the memories shared by community Elders. I would argue that Johnson’s skirt embodies this period of reclamation and resilience: the making of a ribbon skirt recoups traditional matriarchal teachings, the incorporation of serge cloth is reminiscent of colonialism, and the reclamation of ceremony honours the struggle to recoup what was lost and forgotten. In addition to stroud cloth, Johnson’s skirt includes bands of ribbons in satin and period textiles, revealing an interplay between traditional methods and teachings and contemporaneous elements. Close analysis of the skirt reveals that Johnson assembled it by hand-appliquéing alternating bands of satin ribbon and strips of cotton around the base. The cotton fabrics feature paisley and geometric prints that are reminiscent of the colourways and designs that were in fashion in Canada in the 1960s, and were likely remnants from clothing made for family members. These appliquéd bands of colour integrated blue, yellow, red, and green, representing air, earth, fire, and vegetation, respectively, linking the design choices to Mi’kmaw spirituality. Moreover, the incorporation of period prints made from cotton and synthetic textiles makes reference to Johnson’s home economy. The selection of synthetic satin ribbon represents a far less expensive option than silk, used in some earlier ribbon skirts, such as the aforementioned one made by P’ol. Furthermore, the repurposing of textiles cut into ribbons alludes to her mindfulness of the cost of supplies and the probability that she was not commissioned to make this regalia for the purpose of display. While the incorporation of these textiles might present one way in which the maker disrupted existing conceptualisations of what constitutes traditional ceremonial dress, Johnson’s textile and design selections highlight the fluidity and resilience of Mi’kmaw women as they “engaged in heteropatriarchal systems to cope with and survive colonial occupation”.19

Exhibitions and Display as Resistance The display of Johnson’s ribbon skirt at the Citadel Hill exhibition in 1968 engaged Mi’kmaw feminism, disrupting the heteropatriarchal ideals undergirding the installation. Johnson’s ceremonial dress was part of a larger exhibition featuring Nova Scotia women’s cultural dress, including examples from Planter, Loyalist, and Acadian settler communities. Through the exhibition, the collection of cultural dress would have been presented to depict Nova Scotia as a location of cultural diversity and social cohesion, a concept promoted by the federal government during the nation’s centennial celebrations during the previous year.20 Viewed together, the collection of cultural dress installed within the former military establishment suggested a history of peace and friendship between settler groups and the Mi’kmaq under direction of the military, as though the histories of violence, colonisation, and expulsion had been erased. In the almost three centuries since Nova Scotia’s settlement, the British and then the Canadian governments have expelled the Acadians and pursued a path of erasure of its Indigenous population through military aggression, and legislative policies and practices. Directives of aggression and erasure extend back to the early eighteenth century, when, under the direction of Cornwallis, independent rangers were ordered to “to scour the woods, [with] a ten-guinea bounty placed on any Mi’kmaq taken or killed”. 21 Cornwallis’s abhorrent directives, contravening conditions set forth by the

34  Lisa Binkley Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1726, and his position as military commander for Nova Scotia, established for the settler population a notion of Western heteropatriarchal rule within the colonies. From this point forward, Citadel Hill’s presence has been inflected by a culture of marshal masculinity that has historically marginalised women’s social position within society. But while the gendering of social position and colonialism have been viewed as “mutually informing structures”, 22 this equation has failed to take into account Indigenous matriarchal culture. A revised view of Johnson’s regalia, highlighting its agency as a symbol of Indigenous matriarchal society, disrupts this predominant worldview, raising awareness of Mi’kmaq spirituality, and the meaning and power of ribbon skirts. To achieve this understanding, it is essential to know the accumulated meanings of ceremony attached to the making and wearing of ribbon skirts as they have been passed on through oral history telling, the geography of Indigenous histories, and the context in which it exists: each Indigenous nation has its own histories, worldviews, and ways of understanding the land in which it exists. To recoup the meaning of the skirt through Native Feminist Theories is to reconsider the ribbon skirt as subject rather than object, a reconfiguration wherein the regalia “distributes personhood and purpose in the world”, 23 locally and within a broader Indigenous worldview. For the Mi’kmaq, the skirt embodies women’s roles and contributions to matriarchal society, culture, traditions, and the power of Mi’kmaw women across space and time. For the non-Indigenous community, who might be unaware of the significance of women’s regalia, ribbon skirts would have been positioned against “heteropatriarchal logics, often concealed within Western feminist viewpoints”.24 As Johnson’s regalia was presented in the 1960s, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, its misappropriation as clothing and costume completely overlooks its agency within the community and in relation to Mi’kmaw cultural identity. Johnson would have considered the inclusion of her regalia at Citadel Hill to be a result of her participation in Canada’s centennial exhibitions the year prior. The exhibitions at the Smithsonian, aboard the Tall Ships, 25 and at Expo 67 were part of a larger celebration of Canada’s centennial anniversary and served to highlight the federal government’s neo-national initiatives. For Expo 67, the government had brought together Canada’s diverse population through displays of art, innovation, and technology, with the intention to present, on the international stage, the nation’s collective identity and accomplishments. 26 At the Smithsonian, the artist’s basketry was part of a showcase featuring Canada, highlighting its Indigenous culture through an anthropological lens that defined Indigeneity as a historical culture resurfacing in the age of diversity. Aboard the Tall Ships, Johnson demonstrated basketmaking as part of a voyage celebrating the landing of Loyalists in Halifax following American Independence (1776), and the subsequent expulsion of those loyal to the British Crown from New York in 1784. At Expo 67, Johnson’s baskets were installed as part of the groundbreaking exhibition, Indians of Canada, organised by the Expo 67 Task Force, a team brought together under the direction of public relations officer Robert Majoribanks of Indian Affairs and Indigenous artists from across Canada. As part of the Indians of Canada exhibition, Johnson’s basketry would have been recognised for its artistry, skill and Indigeneity, and its contributions to Canada’s national narrative. The exhibition, which was designed by Chipewyan painter Alex Janvier included baskets, drums, print work, sculpture, and weaving, among other handmade items, designed to disrupt previous Indigenous exhibitions that had been

Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt 35 designed as “exoticized and ethnographic”.27 To emphasise the message of the pavilion, a provocative explanatory panel positioned at the entrance primed visitors: You have stolen our native land, our culture, our soul… and yet our traditions deserve to be appreciated, and those derived from an age-old harmony with nature even merited being adopted by you. 28 Although Indians of Canada was met with an overwhelmingly positive response by patrons, drawing more crowds than any other pavilion at Expo 67, 29 the exhibition was framed within a context of neo-nationalism that sought to include Indigenous peoples as part of an emerging multiculturalism. The centennial celebrations occurred during a period of serious introspection by the Government of Canada, which was intent on responding to concerns of racism and discrimination that had been raised by various groups from across the country. Several inquiries initiated to investigate issues confronting Canada’s predominantly marginalised groups—immigrants, the French, Indigenous peoples, and women— were the subjects of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963), 30 the Hawthorn Report (1966–1967), the White Paper, (1969), and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1970). However inclusive and progressive these investigations may have appeared to the general public, the inquiries ultimately reinforced the power of dominant White-Anglo settler groups in Canada. Ultimately, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism substantiated the underlying framework of multiculturalist policies that continue to govern Canada today, maintaining an emphasis on the dominance of French and British ancestry and their two associated languages.31 The other inquiries honed in on Indigenous and women’s issues: the Hawthorn Report documented social and economic conditions of Indigenous peoples across Canada; the White Paper recommended the elimination of the Indian Act, which also included extinguishing all treaties;32 and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women sought to ensure, For women, equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society, having regard for the distribution of legislative powers under the constitution of Canada, particularly with reference to federal statues, regulations, and policies that concern or affect the rights and activities of women.33 This series of government-driven inquiries suggested an awareness of the social challenges surrounding issues of diversity and rights. They did not, however, consider the intersectionality of Indigenous women’s issues and failed to bring forth any real substantive changes to the rights of culturally diverse groups, especially non-White immigrants and Indigenous peoples.34 The results of a year of cross-country interviews conducted by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women indicated that the voices of Indigenous women had been thus far absent from the inquiry. Attending to this issue, under the direction of Judy LaMarsh, Minister of National Health and Welfare Administration, and Laura Sabia, first Chair of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and President of the Canadian Federation of University Women, Commission members travelled to northern Canada. The primary focus for the visit north was to hear

36  Lisa Binkley from Indigenous women who had been unable to attend hearings, because they found it too difficult to travel to the hearing locations due to the great distances between communities in the Canadian north, or because they were in prison and held in facilities far removed from their home communities. An additional barrier was that many potential participants were unable to write in English or French. In one instance, committee member Florence Bird travelled to the home of Mary Anne LaHache, an Indigenous woman, who was unable to travel to hearings because of her health and the lack of resources to get there. Interviewed at her home, LaHache shared how her impoverished living conditions stemmed from her loss of income due to epilepsy and divorce.35 According to Section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act (1876), Any Indian woman marrying any other than an Indian, shall cease to be an Indian within the meaning of this Act, nor shall the children issue of such marriage be considered as Indians within the meaning of this Act; Provided also, that any Indian woman marrying an Indian of any other tribe, band or body shall cease to be a member of the tribe, band, or body to which she formerly belonged, and become a member of the tribe, band, or body of which her husband is a member, and the children, issue of this marriage, shall belong to their father’s tribe only.36 As a result, LaHache was stripped of her status following her divorce, consequently losing financial and emotional support from her home community.37 In its findings, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women task force acknowledged that, although faced with grave circumstances, Indigenous women should continue to be viewed through the same lens as those in mainstream-settler society. Mi’kmaq scholar Marie Battiste asserts that Euro-settler ideologies and government policies have succeeded in “generating damaging legacies of hierarchy, domination, intolerance, hatred, and the annihilation of others”.38 This is particularly frustrating for Indigenous women, who were once the centre of Indigenous culture and community, and have been weakened under decades of overarching government regulations, contributing to worsening conditions and exacerbating poverty and despair. 39 LaHache’s case highlights how the government’s commitment to its settler system continues to contribute to the marginalisation of Indigenous peoples in areas of education, health care, and justice. Systemic restrictions make it difficult for Indigenous peoples and, especially, Indigenous women, to escape from the legacies of racism, misogyny, and violence. During the 1960s, as oppressive policies came into focus through the series of inquiries, the government reinforced its position, evidently refusing to consider alternative and, more specifically, matriarchal worldviews. “Between 1958 and 1968 alone, more than 100,000 women lost their Indigenous status as a result of these provisions”.40 This existing mode of governance was exacerbated by the various centennial celebrations that sought to foster a sense of cohesive national identity based on sociocultural Euro-settler identity. In 1973, Jeannette Lavell and Yvonne Bédard pursued legal action against the Government of Canada; it was the first instance in Canadian legal history that opposing worldviews were acknowledged. Under an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, Lavell and Bédard demanded that their Indigenous rights be recognised with consideration to Section 15 of the Canadian Bill of Rights, an act guaranteeing all Canadians with essential human rights.41 In an unprecedented hearing before the

Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt 37 Supreme Court of Canada, it was declared that the Indian Act, the law governing the status of all Indigenous people, was, in fact, exempt from the Canadian Bill of Rights. Under Section 15(1) of the Bill of Rights, Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.42 Accordingly, under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the application of the Indian Act to the Bill of Rights, all Canadians are declared as eligible for basic human rights, except for Indigenous peoples. In response to these exceptions, Haudenosaunee lawyer Patricia Monture Angus asserts, We live in a country where women’s equality rights were not automatic. Equality rights were something that women had to stand up and justify. The fact that section 15, stating all people in Canada are equal, did not grow out of a kind, caring and nurturing relationship … or out of respect. Its seeds were planted in a fight.43 Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Lavell and Bédard further appealed to the United Nations, which in 1981, after eight years, finally handed down a decision agreeing that Canada had, in fact, breached the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.44 Although the UN decision was indeed a significant step forward for Indigenous women in Canada, the realisation was that in order to achieve any “formal equality or civil rights within a nation-state”, it was necessary to pursue “substantial independence from a Western nation-state—independence decided on [one’s] own terms”.45

Conclusion Taking into consideration the legal pursuits of Lavell and Bédard and the creative productions of Margaret Johnson, through the lenses of Native Feminist Theories that interrogate language and heteropatriarchal systems of oppression entrenched in legacies of colonialism, Indigenous women are faced with additional burdens that, as noted by Patricia Monture Angus, are prefaced with the necessity of struggle. Lavell and Bédard were forced to reach out beyond the Canadian legal system, entrenched in a Western worldview, to receive acknowledgement that Indigenous women were entitled to equality and fair civil rights. Through their process of challenging Canada’s legal system, they disrupted what had become an accepted legal discourse with an unfailing abidance to a system absent of alternative worldviews. Alternatively, Margaret Johnson engaged in another form of disruption that, through the creative processes of making and display, complicated the Government of Canada’s opportunity to reinvigorate ideas of nationalism and social cohesion. Dr Granny’s method of intervention might be viewed as more subtle and perhaps less litigious than that of Lavell and Bédard; the presentation of her worldviews as embodied in traditional handmade objects reached substantial international audiences that might have, for the first time, been introduced to the ideas and prominence of Indigenous women’s craft within a national scope. Unfortunately, although the absence of any record of

38  Lisa Binkley the exhibition from the archival record permits only speculation about the audience’s interpretation of the Citadel Hill exhibition, a review of the installation affords the opportunity to review and disrupt any intentions that might have excluded the ideas of matriarchal identity and equality from the public spectacle altogether. Considered together, Lavell and Bédard, and Johnson, revealed the diversity and singularity of Indigenous feminisms, a concept that confronts ideas of settler colonialism and heteropatriarchal structures. Because of the diversity of Indigenous nations across Canada, the ways in which Indigenous women have navigated the predominant social structure have been equally diverse. Whether strategies have posed more assertive responses from individuals or communities depends on the set of circumstances arising from experiences, such as Treaties, settlement patterns, and life experiences. Although Lavell, Bédard, and Johnson are all influenced by the Peace and Friendship Treaties, the more recent experiences of individual women have determined how they chose to navigate the system through their own form of feminist activism: these varied experiences are all factors. Nevertheless, the overarching state system has required Indigenous women to cope with the dominant ideologies that have informed how governments regulate. Because settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy are “mutually informing structures”, Indigenous women have had to learn to adapt to these systems as a mode of survival. Therefore, it is necessary to recognise the variety of responses by Indigenous women to gain a better understanding of the larger systems of resistance at play. Reposing the significance of Indigenous women’s voices at the Citadel Hill and Expo 67 installations through Dr Granny’s creative productions reveals how the agency of these objects has mobilised and provoked useful questions about Indigenous women’s lives within the ongoing legacy of the colonial-settler state. Johnson’s regalia allows for discourse among women’s positions within settler society, empowering a thoughtfulness through which others may better understand the larger roles of spirituality, fertility, and equality within the larger system.

Notes 1 Eve Tuck and Karyn Recollet, “Introduction to Native Feminist Texts,” English Journal, Vol. 106 no. 1 (2016): 17. 2 Ibid., 17. 3 Leiliani Sabzalian, “Curricular Standpoints and Native Feminist Theories: Why Native Feminist Theories Should Matter to Curriculum Studies,” Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 48 no. 3 (2018): 366. 4 Mareike Neuhaus, The Decolonizing Poetics of Indigenous Literatures (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015), 2. 5 Daniel Paul, “Dr. Margaret ‘Granny’ Johnson,” last modified 2010, http://www.danielnpaul.com/MargaretGrannyJohnson.html (accessed March 10, 2019). 6 Ibid. 7 Ribbon Skirt Accession File, 1972.198.2, Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, NS. 8 Kari Dawn Wuttunee, Jennifer Altenberg, and Sarah Flicker, “Red Ribbon Skirts and Cultural Resurgence,” Girlhood Studies, Vol. 12 no. 3 (Winter 2019): 66; For more on the spirituality and teachings of ribbon skirts, see Angela Moore, “Sewing Ribbon Skirt Stitches the Bonds of a Community,” National News APTN, last modified March 2019, https://aptnnews.ca/2018/12/20/sewing-ribbon-skirt-stitches-the-bonds-of-a-comunity/. 9 Charlotte Loppie Reading and Fred Wien, Health Inequalities and the Social Determinants of Aboriginal Peoples’ Health (Prince George, BC: National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009), 19.

Reviewing a 1960s Mi’kmaq Ribbon Skirt 39 10 Jessica Metcalfe, “Ribbon Skirts: Clothing, Strength, Sacredness,” last modified 2017, http:www.beyondbuckskin.com/2017/04/ribbon-skirts-clothing-strength-and.html; the wigwam is commonly used in Mi’kma’ki and is also recognized in Dakota language as tipi or teepee, or in Cree as likiiwaap. 11 Carol Markstrom, Empowerment of North American Indian Girls: Ritual Expressions at Puberty (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 12. 12 Author unknown, History of American Indian Ribbonwork, Milwaukee Public Museum, last modified 2019, https://www.mpm.edu/research-collections/anthropology/onlinecollections-research/ribbonwork-woodland-indians/history-an, Menominee territory is located in present-day Wisconsin. 13 Timothy J. Kent, Rendezvous at the Straits: Fur Trade and Military Activities at For de Buade and Fort Michilimackinac, 1669–1781 (Ossineke, MI: Silver Fox Enterprises, 2004), 404. 14 Cory Wilmott, “From Stroud to Strouds: The Hidden History of a British Fur Trade Textile,” Textile History, Vol. 36 no. 2 (2005): 200. 15 James Rodger Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 16 Daniel Paul, We Were Not the Savages: Collision Between European and Native American Civilization (Halifax: Fernwood, 2006). 17 William Wicken, “Peace and Friendship Treaties,” Government of Canada, last modified 10 Dec 2015, https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100028589/1539608999656. 18 Alfred Scow, Transcriptions of Public Hearings and Round Table Discussions, 1992– 1993, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1992), Courtesy of the University of Saskatchewan Archives: http://scaa.sk.ca/ ourlegacy/permalink/30466, 342. 19 Tuck and Recollet, “Introduction to Native Feminist Texts,” 17. 20 Ribbon Skirt Accession File, 1972.198.2, Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, NS. 21 John G. Reid, “The Three Lives of Edward Cornwallis,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, Vol. 16 (2013): 23. Reid further notes how, although the details of Britain and New England’s claims regarding Mi’kmaw scalps is indeed uncertain, there is repeated reference to details involving secret ranger expeditions. 22 Tuck and Recollet, “Introduction to Native Feminist Texts,” 17. 23 Sabzalian, “Curricular Standpoints and Native Feminist Theories,” 366. 24 Ibid., 367. 25 The Tall Ships are a series of replica schooners used in contemporary celebrations of settlement in the Maritimes. In this case, the voyage of the Tall Ships from Halifax to New York symbolized the arrival of British Empire Loyalists following their expulsion in 1783–1784, from the United States following the American War of Independence. 26 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 54. 27 Sandra Alfoldy, Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada (Montreal-Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2005), 119; For example, in 1966 at McCullough’s Canadian Crafts exhibition, which maintained a “colonial approach to craft”, only one of twenty objects made by Indigenous people were identified by the maker’s name: a pair of beaded moccasins by Mrs. John Morris of Trout Lake, Ontario. 28 Ibid., 119. 29 Ibid., 107. 30 Sarah V. Wayland, “Immigration, Multiculturalism and National Identity in Canada,” International Journal of Group Rights, Vol. 5 no. 1 (1997): 46–47. 31 Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration: Canada and Australia Compared, 2nd ed. (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 218; The framing of Canada’s official policies on Multiculturalism responded to political pressures from Quebec that, at the time, had begun entertaining ideas of separation from the rest of Canada in efforts to maintain a society distinct from the rest of English Canada. 32 Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, ‘“It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Vol. 17 no. 2 (2006): 155.

40  Lisa Binkley 33 https://historyofrights.ca/encyclopaedia/main-events/1970-royal-commission-statuswomen/; The commissioners were Florence Bayard Bird, Chairperson; Lola M. Lange, Jeanne Lapointe, Elsie Gregory MacGill, Doris Ogilvie, Jacques Henripin, and Donald Gordon, Jr. 34 Peter S. Li. “The Multiculturalism Debate,” in Race and Ethnic Relations in Canada, 2nd Ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999), 152. 35 https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/commission-on-the-status-of-women-hears-submissions; In a remote area, away from basic amenities, LaHache lived in a small hut-like structure, barely heated by a small wood stove, forced to work as domestic laborer only occasionally due to her lack of education and a disability. Epilepsy kept her from finding more stable and/ or better paying employment. 36 Government of Canada, An Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of Indians, 1869, https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/ DAM / DAM-INTER-HQ/STAGING/texte-text/ a69c6_1100100010205_eng.pdf. 37 https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/commission-on-the-status-of-women-hears-submissions. 38 Marie Battiste, “Reframing the Humanities: From Cognitive Assimilation to Cognitive Justice,” in Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities, (Sydney: Cape Breton University Press, 2016), 6; italics my own. 39 Janet Silman, Enough is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1987). 40 Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality (Port Coquitlam: Indigenous Relations Press, 2018), 21. 41 Government of Canada, Canadian Bill of Rights, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/ acts/c-12.3/page-1.html. 42 Government of Canada, The Canadian Bill of Rights, Sec. 15(1), https://www.justice. gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/art15.html. 43 Patricia Monture Angus, Thunder in my Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (Halifax: Fernwood, 1995), 134. 44 Silman, Enough is Enough, 26. 45 Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations, Vol. 25 no. 1 (2013): 10.

2

Winding Up to Be Unfurled Art History as Casa Espiral Sarah Lookofsky

The spiral is a form intersecting with metaphor. Moving from a point in the near, it turns outward, weaving in more and more surrounds with every successive churn. Or, it spins inward, condensing to an infinitesimal field of intensity that might resemble a knot.

Turning Back In 1966, Cecilia Vicuña drew a spiral in the sand on the beach of Concón, along the Pacific coast of Chile (Fig. 2.1). She smoothed over the sand around the spiral and, at its perimeter, erected a precarious fence-like structure of materials, primarily driftwood, found on the site. Not long after the work came into being, the tide washed it away. A black and white photograph indexes the occasion today. The artist, Cecilia Vicuña, considers this her first artwork and has since returned to the same site to recreate and produce similar iterations: drawings in the sand, the creation of intimate configurations of inorganic and organic materials found on site, sometimes documented and often accompanied by words and singing in a tempo directed by the pulsation of the waves, to be dismantled and swept away by currents (Fig. 2.2).1 Here, the landscape is not a static ground for the figure of the work; rather it is a relational presence that is the very condition of possibility for the work, allowing it to take shape and then to cease to exist. We begin again, yet differently this time: in 1966, a woman artist of the Southern Cone created a spiral in the landscape. This act preceded a male North American artist's creation of a spiral of rocks in a North American landscape by three years. Hers was a spiral that related to the scale of her body; its torque depended on the compass of her arm outstretched. Then it disappeared. His was a very large spiral, consisting of durable elements, capable of withstanding decades of shifts in the land. Decades on, his spiral is still there despite climatological and geological changes within the rocky landscape where it was inscribed, as its institutional caretakers continue to shepherd this artwork into the present. Over the course of decades, she has returned many times, recreating the same shape, with different materials, each time overturned by the waves. By art historical habit, land art denotes a genre in which artists situate their works in a landscape, understood as being at a distance from, and thus by implication outside of, the confines of an art institution. The historicisation of land art has recently, as in the extensive 2012 exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, been widened to include a range of artists beyond North America not typically associated with it.2 Vicuña’s work, made for a particular landscape, falls within

42  Sarah Lookofsky

Figure 2.1  Cecilia Vicuña, Casa Espiral (Spiral House), 1966, photoreproduction of site-­ specific performative installation. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

the temporal frame of land art’s heyday and could thus be argued to merit placement within this expanding category.3 Vicuña’s spiral deserves consideration within the art historical narratives of feminist practice, land art, and conceptualism from which it has been frequently excluded. It is tempting, therefore, to seek to right this decades-long omission by inserting a new historical beginning into a sequential, historical trajectory, in which the woman, this time, offers the point of departure. Reversing the firstness, from the man to the woman, Cecilia, the young girl, would become the heroine of a new story, a new matriarchal point of origin. We might anticipate, though, that such efforts would not be recognised. Art historical conventions would prevent the absorption of our proposed replacement. When she

Winding Up to Be Unfurled 43

Figure 2.2  Cecilia Vicuña, Erased Spiral, Concón, Chile, 2009, mixed media. Photo credit James O’Hern. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

created the spiral, Cecilia was young. The work was created the year after she left high school, at age seventeen, and before she started architecture school. According to the common practice of art historical storytelling, we might push this moment aside. The artist was too young, too undeveloped, too erratic. She had not yet discovered her voice. To tell art histories otherwise means finding a vocabulary for talking about the practices of young girls, insisting on them, making it possible to consider the multitude of practices that were begun but not sustained because of duties like domestic work, child rearing, wage- and farm work, as well as lack of access to art schools, because their lives and work unfold outside the Western nexus that grants recognition, and so on.4 Only then can we create an art history that affords a place for those who would have but could not. But in order to do this work of reorganising histories, perhaps we were looking in the wrong place. It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…. No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank white Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain. That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.5

44  Sarah Lookofsky In her brilliant essay, “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, Ursula Le Guin tells the story of a different fundament of the human species and, with it, the stories we humans tell ourselves of our beginnings. Instead of the slaying of mammoths and the spear as principal tool, and the heroic storyline that follows it, Ursula thinks about the many people, probably women, who gathered seeds and grasses in a slow and unspectacular fashion while nurturing others. She also thinks about the vessel or bottle they fashioned for this purpose, which might be instead considered our actual, originating species tool. She then urges us to rethink the narrative models this type of activity and collectivity necessitate. What if we displaced the heroic act of creation, its tool (brush, axe, earth mover) and medium (isolated, unitary form, solid hard rock), to instead consider a repetitive and borrowed creation, absent of spectacular, narrative-thrusting tools and results, and in which the beginning, middle, and end defy capture. The action is principally one of collection, not creation; the materials gathered possess their own value, capacities, and purpose—they are not endowed by the artist. Resisting the temptation to triumphantly narrate an alternate first, a feminist first, this essay is instead a writerly attempt at circumventing such a method in an effort to practice what it might mean to think historically otherwise.6 Zeroing in on the role of the creator denies the invariable predecessors that are lost in such trajectories. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (…) If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.7 To allow a space for the girl-artist, the housekeeper-artist, the mother-artist is also to factor into the equation the existence of the girl, the housekeeper and mother-side, to the left of the hyphen, as intrinsically bound up with and connected to the other (artist) side of the hyphen; the side we tend to focus on at the expense of all else. If our attention was on how our daily acts of care and dependency connect to our paid or professional work—if we think of these as interdependent modes of being and making—then art would take on different kinds of meaning altogether. In her work, Saidiya Hartman has forged a method for ascribing life, refusal and radical rebellion to Black girls in spite of their archival absence, negligence, pathologisation, and criminalisation. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she writes of the chorus, and the chorine within it, as a collective formation of the minor: The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not

Winding Up to Be Unfurled 45 leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution. The chorus propels transformation. It is an incubator of possibility, an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise. (…) So everything depends on them and not the hero occupying center stage, preening and sovereign. Inside the circle it is clear that every song is really the same song, but crooned in infinite variety, every story altered and unchanging (…).8 Saidiya calls on the reader to recognise the minor figure in collective formation, acts unremarkable in themselves but sensible in the longue durée, the revolutionary capacity of living against all odds, and the act of creation as collective, mutable, and iterative. In so doing, we may begin again.

Spiralling Out The spiral is not the male artist’s to claim, nor was it hers to begin with. Although it was traced anew, it was already there as a form practiced by many nameless others who came before. There are Inca spirals and there are Celtic spirals, indicating perhaps a human propensity for cosmologies directed outwards beyond ourselves and our own species. There are spirals throughout Cecilia’s practice. Casa Espiral is one of the spirals, which appears in her precario (precarious) series of works, which are made in “collaboration”, a word she often uses, with the materials and movements of a site. It also appears in her related basuritas (little trash) sculptural works that are fashioned from found objects (Fig. 2.3). I look through Cecilia’s history of practice and find

Figure 2.3  Cecilia Vicuña, Canasto Espiral, 1986, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

46  Sarah Lookofsky

Figure 2.4  Cecilia Vicuña, Vellón Espiral, 2010, unspun wool, site-specific installation. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

spirals in all shapes and sizes across her artistic timeline: what looks like a found coaster, woven like a basket, intersected and thus elevated from the ground by feathers and sticks; etched in the wet sand; a large mass of richly dyed red wool rolled up (Fig. 2.4); a poem written in spiraling text (Fig. 2.5), among other things.9 When asked, Cecilia does not reference one spiral of origin but only enumerates. The longer the conversation, the more spirals come to mind: the memory of her mother, who is of Mapuche heritage and who always looked to the spirals in a baby’s hair to detect the sex of the next child (a remolino! she exclaims); the spiral of a fingerprint; the motion of the wave; the spinning of yarn; the circulatory flows of blood and breath; the milky way (“the original spiral!”); the swirling of water into a drain; and of course the knot in the quipu, (an Inca method of recording and storytelling, which is a common reference throughout her practice from poetry to sculpture). A spiral is infinitely repeatable and, although sometimes manifest in skilled creations, at its most rudimentary, it requires no specialised training to come into being. It is, she says, “a moment of energy, the language of life itself”.10 Cecilia’s multifaceted practice, across poetry, performance, conceptual practice, film, drawing, and painting, is intricately connected. Just as her work frequently binds word to thread to object, thus drawing upon the connections between woven objects and systems of knowledge in Andean cultures,11 she routinely connects the minuscule (sometimes atoms, sometimes trash) to the majestic (like galaxies or millennia). The spiral appears to be an important conduit of such scalar leaps, from the minute to the major, while maintaining intricate connectivity between all individual elements. Though it might appear finite, the spiral elicits the capacity for infinity.

Winding Up to Be Unfurled 47

Figure 2.5  Cecilia Vicuña, Instan, 2012, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

It can be perceived on a plane, yet it can also be multidimensional. Like a Klein bottle or a Mobius strip, the outside and the inside cannot be held apart. In her pivotal essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective on Feminist Epistemologies and Objectivity”, Donna Haraway writes of “a material-semiotic actor”: [T]his unwieldy term is intended to portray the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part or apparatus of bodily production, without ever implying the immediate presence of such objects, or what is the same thing, their final or unique determination of what can count as objective knowledge at a particular historical juncture. Like ‘poems,’ which are sites of literary production where language too is an actor independent of intentions and authors, bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialise in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not preexist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies.12

48  Sarah Lookofsky The spiral, limited and unlimited, form and idea, in shape as well as history, is an alluring invitation to enter into an exercise of boundary thinking. In Cecilia’s work, the visual, spatial spiral is always related to the oral one that appears in many places in her poetry, too. Both spiral and poem are at once social interaction and offering, intended for both human and nonhuman reception.13 Just as we cannot delimit a spiral or word to a particular historical moment in time or a place of creation, we cannot pinpoint one individual creator as its originator. To consider this spiral, thus, is to consider a web of other spirals, in a multitude of places that, though each specific, are unbound by east and west, north and south. Boundary thinking further prompts us to think of creators of spirals within a web of collectivities, inviting us to look for relationships with others, before and all around, as necessary to any act of creation. Retracing the spiral reframes the act of art making, not as an act of autonomous innovation on the part of an individual, but always as a repetition of contingent and situated acts that are passed down and inherited, just as they are provisional. This does not prevent us from looking at this particular spiral, acknowledging our own perspective of a later moment, while concentrating on the materials and traditions from which it draws, and examining the site and history upon which it rests. In doing so, we negotiate the boundary of the work, defined anew every time it is studied and made richer when recognising that the spiral came into being within a matrix of interdependencies in which humans as well as other species are not hierarchically, chronologically ordered, but necessarily bound together in tangled histories.

The Spiral Is Not Human; the Curvature of the Snail’s Back, the Nest, the Fern, the Tornado With its multiple and geographically distributed origin stories and its infinite repetition, from those naturally occurring to human-made examples, the spiral allows us to think differently than the art historical spear thrust of unidirectional influence, evolving from one human mind to another, from a younger to an older, from a man to a woman, beginning in Europe and winding up elsewhere, always years later. Against teleology, the circuitous curl of the spiral has a starting point, but not a linear trajectory, creating a movement that is as much about doubling back as it is about expanding or shrinking. In the work, the spiral exists in relation to the coastal landscape, governed by cycles, flows, and repetitions; thereby confounding the directionality of past, present, and future. In Andean philosophies, consistently a reference for Cecilia, time is cyclical, and past and future are in close relation; the past is frequently represented as being in front, in full view, just as it is capable of return, of becoming future14 —itself a spiral curl.15 In Cecilia’s spiral, time is not registered in the work’s projection into a future beyond the artist’s lifetime, or in its subsequent entropic demise, but in the multiplicity of creations by the artist as well as other spiral makers, past and future. Temporality is marked in a stuttering repetition of reproduction and disappearance, towards indeterminate pasts and futures. The act of creation is inextricably tied to destruction; making and unmaking are the enmeshed facts of the work. The spiral and its ancient antecedents invite us to think about time in excess of historical time, considering also deep time: history that is not mapped, archived, or recorded and in which humans are not central. To properly comprehend the spiral and its intricate relationship to place, taking seriously the conditions of the work’s

Winding Up to Be Unfurled 49 existence and disappearance, the habitual separation between human and natural history—in which the former is construed as the domain of human creation and the latter everything that is beyond human control—demands deconstruction.16 The conditions of possibility of the spiral are the ground upon which it rests, a ground that has shaped and has been shaped by geological, Indigenous, and colonial histories. Concón, which is derived from the word Co, a word of Mapuche origin referring to water,17 is located at the mouth of the Aconcagua River, which originates in the Aconcagua glacier, a downward flow disrupted by capitalist and colonial interventions in the landscape of the Andes and significantly slowed as a result of anthropogenic climate change.18 At the mouth of the river sits also the ENAP oil refinery. As testament to the longue durée of the spirals’ place—and literalising the Anthropocene’s churn of geological strata (including fossils-as-oil and human remains)—the local refinery is a largely inaccessible archaeological site with evidence of inhabitation in this place that dates back 2000 years.19 Indeed, as artist and work insist, the land is not a disconnected backdrop of the spiral, just as the human is part of nature. As Anna Tsing writes, “Science has inherited stories about human mastery from the great monotheistic religions. These stories fuel assumptions about human autonomy, and they direct questions to the human control of nature, on the one hand, or human impact on nature, on the other, rather than to species interdependence”. 20 How might such species interdependencies and interconnected stories reconfigure our understanding of art and the artistic event? Cecilia’s works’ dependence on what was found on site, and absorption into the landscape, bespeaks multiple levels of interdependencies. Theorisations of multispecies life in the context of anthropogenic climate change provide a ground for considering the lack of distinction between the types of material found on site, between trash and organic matter, new and old, and native and non-native. Indeed, these categories are inextricably wound together in Cecilia’s work. Much like plastiglomerates, 21 which came into existence as a result of humans’ enduring consumption of plastic, these forms are not the creation of humans, but rather some amalgamation woven by an anarchic multispecies party that includes waves, bacteria, algae, and minerals. To properly absorb the relationships of the piece is thereby also to relinquish a story that depends upon human mastery as a succession of humans dominating the earth. The spiral, as acknowledged here, is not a novel shape, but one that is inherited and repeated, just as it is found all around in non-human domains. Just as the spiral spirals out, its inward turn points towards the microscopic domains of microbes, bacteria, atoms, ungraspable by the human eye. Just as the innovative artistic gesture is bound up with patriarchal ideas of mastery and domination, so too is the notion of the land as blank slate connected to settler colonialism’s construction of terra nullius, a space ideologically constructed for possession and exploitation. While Cecilia uses the materials she finds on site, considering them as transformed by the artist’s hand into artistic media conforms too readily to the dynamic born out of the ideological operations of colonialist takeover and capitalist extractivism. As Donna aptly wrote of white capitalist patriarchy’s conception of “resourcing”, 22 it “turns everything into a resource for appropriation, in which an object of knowledge is finally itself only matter for the seminal power, the act, of the knower. Here, the object both guarantees and refreshes the power of the knower, but any status as agent in the productions of knowledge must be denied the object”.23 To counter this understanding, she proposes a feminist understanding of “situated knowledges”,

50  Sarah Lookofsky which “require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge”.24 This view of the world unspools nature/culture and subject/object dichotomies: “Accounts of a ‘real’ world do not, then, depend on a logic of ‘discovery’ but on a power-charged social relation of ‘conversation’. The world neither speaks itself nor disappears in favour of a master decoder. The codes of the world are not still, waiting only to be read. The world is not raw material for humanization (…)”.25 When mastery and dominance are relinquished, the world emerges as an active subject that cannot be wholly mapped and appropriated. To properly acknowledge the spiral means to recognise other agential capacities within the landscape—the weeds that grow, the discarded trash, the waves that wash it up—that made the work possible and, in turn, make it impossible to consider the artist and the work apart from them. As the field of art history has become increasingly globalised, and as calls for inclusion have been on the rise, the response has too often been a flattening of meanings, as histories in the global south are made to correspond neatly with definitions honed in hegemonic centres. Such a sweeping up of alternate histories into a common story could easily assimilate the spiral on the beach in Concón into a new, now-globalised category of land art—a new point on the map, a new dot on the art historical timeline. Widening the lens is important indeed, allowing us to think of art’s relationship to land in ways that do not elide how land has played a crucial part in histories of capitalist, racialised colonisation in South America, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Wide-sweeping stories must not lose track of the localised, sited practices and landscapes, in this case the spiral in Concón. For this work, it is useful to return to Donna’s “Situated Knowledges”, a feminist epistemology of objectivity that insists on the need for “an earthwide network of connections and the ability partially to translate knowledges among different—and power-differentiated—communities”. Discouraging distanced viewing in favour of a limited range that focuses on embodiment and interconnections as they manifest in the immediate, she writes, “The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular. The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. (…) Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions—of views from somewhere”.26 Cecilia’s spiral is within arm’s reach. It cannot be seen from outer space. The work draws from her own sited history. Raised in proximity to the beach, she has ancestors who lived nearby for generations.27 Her poetry, performances, and artworks entail a dense layering of histories and a mixing of references and inspirations that include Andean philosophies, histories of colonial conquest, and capitalist-derived pollution washed up on shore and emitting from local refineries. Cecilia’s practice at once draws upon a learned interest in Indigenous systems of knowledge that offer alternate trajectories from Western mimetic and written codes, while acting as much as a marker for the brutality of colonial erasures that have rendered these intricate histories mute. Constituted on the ground of erasure, loss, and contamination, resistance in Cecilia’s work happens as an invention of form, one that calls forth lost trajectories and animates alternate outcomes. With these historical circumstances as ground, Cecilia’s works are often barely present. Catherine de Zegher writes, “Read in comparison with the Land Art of

Winding Up to Be Unfurled 51 Nancy Holt and Richard Long, Cecilia Vicuña’s earth works differ not only in their relationship to the environment and the body, but also in their diffusion of knowledge. In contradistinction to Vicuña’s perception, these artists have staged a landscape for the viewer to colonize in order to aggrandize the self and to summon awe for the sublime Other, which may in fact be a justification for obliterating it. (…) in the case of Vicuña, the earth work is not about appearance but about disappearance”. 28 Echoing Ursula and Saidiya’s aforementioned insistence on the basal role of collective, fleeting acts—and thus the yoking of the impermanent with the continuous—as well as the systematic expunging of these lives lived by hegemonic histories, Cecilia points out that Andean civilisations were not recognised as significant since they did not create structures of permanence but rather weaving, singing, and oral traditions that were passed down, reinvented, and which persist today in syncretic forms.29 Cecilia’s work acknowledges the erasures upon the landscape that colonialism affected; her practice of careful placement within it is a directed rejoinder to this legacy. Her initial denomination of these works as precarios arose from their “propensity to disappear”. She subsequently realised that precario “comes from the Latin precis, prayer, and from precarius, what is obtained through prayer (…) a way of remembering, of recovering a language”.30 While the “precarious” in recent decades has come to be associated with the subjects of neoliberal capitalism, squeezed by volatile labour markets and the simultaneous decrease of social securities, 31 Cecilia’s use of the term seems closer to Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics, founded on a recognition of “the extreme precariousness of the other”.32 The precarious is similarly co-constitutive, dialogical, and ontological for Cecilia, though here the other is expanded to include nonhuman entities. A situated methodology that also takes into account agencies beyond the human provides a good starting point for thinking about the imbrication of two distinctly treated, yet deeply interrelated, large-scale processes that have determinative impacts on local contexts, namely the mechanisms of globalisation and global warming. 33 In the situated space of the work that is our starting point, while drawing in elements from the immediate ecosystem of Concón, some of them borne from the species migrations and displacements that colonialism engendered, Cecilia’s spirals also draw upon plastic and other jetsam castoff from oceanic capitalist circulation. Moreover, the work’s existence is constituted in relation to the melting of the glacier above and sea-level rise, both resulting from global warming produced by transgeographic histories of extraction and consumption. These large-scale processes are manifested adjacent to the spirals’ site by oil refineries at the mouth of the Aconcagua River that are transactionally intertwined with multinational conglomerates, to meet global, albeit majority Western, demand for fossil fuels. 34 Environmental histories in Chile are inflected by the ongoing aftereffects of Pinochet’s US-backed dictatorship from 1973 to 1990, which resulted in landmark neoliberal policies, including the enshrining of the privatisation of water in the country’s constitution and the 1981 Water Code. To this day, the majority ownership of the Chilean water supply by transnational corporations and funds, which privilege agriculture and industry over community use and charge high usage fees, has become a major rallying cause of contemporary resistance movements, many of them feminist. 35 The ability to read the work’s sited position in relation to the earthwide flows it draws from is connected with the ways in which climate justice and social justice must attend to how global systems are differently manifested, and thus differently resisted, depending on the site and the body affected.

52  Sarah Lookofsky

Weaving Interdependencies Thinking still about beginnings and how to mark that initial point of the spiral, I ask Cecilia how she knew that this was her first artwork. She responds that she remembers making the spiral at a time when she became aware that the waves were aware. This story is repeated in multiple places, recently in an interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson: My art began on a given day in the year 1966, in January, when I felt that the ocean was alive and had as much awareness as I do now. I felt in complete awe and my life changed in that very moment, because I had this awareness—an awareness of its awareness. I felt that I needed to respond, to make a sign to indicate to the ocean that I understood. So, I picked up a little stick that was just lying about. It was this beach that had a lot of debris. I stood it up, and once I stood it up, making it vertical, I knew that in that change—between horizontal and vertical—I had woven [emphasis mine] my place in the world.36 The spiral marks a point of beginning of the artist’s awareness of creating within a totality of mutuality and exchange that is much vaster than she and that is composed of a multiplicity of others. “I see that you see”, she says. This exchange of glances reminds of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s writing on Amerindian perspectivism, of cosmologies according to which “the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view”.37 It is a worldview that implies a radical equivalence of perspectives and which encompasses both a look at the other as well as a self-recognition that is like personhood. “Following the analogy with the pronominal set we see that between the reflexive ‘I’ of culture (the generator of the concepts of soul or spirit) and the impersonal ‘it’ of nature (definer of the relation with somatic alterity), there is a position missing, the ‘you’, the second person, or the other taken as other subject, whose point of view is the latent echo of that of the ‘I’”.38 Central to Cecilia’s quote above, and to her art and poetry practices, is weaving. It presents us with a heritage, often practised by women, which, like the spiral, has multiple origin stories, traditions, and lineages around the world. It is a slow labour, a labour of decoration that cannot be separated from its utility in furnishing lifeprotecting warmth. Here, too, humans do it, just like spiders make webs and birds make nests. Like the spiral, too, it functions as metaphor, denoting a binding together, where parts become whole as individual strands become a collective pattern. Here nature binds with culture, as humans are linked with other species in relationships where individual units cannot be separated from the rest. In a conversation with Cecilia, I asked her if she would consider Casa Espiral land art, to which she responded, “The work is land art because it comes from the place itself”. The sentence, which could be glossed over as an acquiescence to a global art historical category, importantly instead denotes a creative instance of méconnaissance, redefinition, a change in perspective, which might be summarised as follows: rather than the place being a site for the artist’s creation, and thus creating an equivalence with other practices worldwide, the particularity of the place originates the work, thus making it a work that acknowledges the fundamental necessity of land as the condition of possibility for all creation.

Winding Up to Be Unfurled 53 Changing the conception of a work as arising from land instead of as positioned upon it, and thus recognising the set of relations imbricated in such a shift, entails much more than simply expanding the field of art history. Instead, we need a framework that enables us to consider artworks as forms in and of the world that are susceptible to repetition and destruction as well as failed beginnings. With such a radical restructuring, form becomes mutable and transformative, never fixed, allowing us to apprehend the multitude of spirals—rolled in wool, scraped in sand, coiled in scrap metal—and their relation to the multiplicity of other spirals that the artist did not touch. Parting with some elemental practices of Western scientific objectivity, when applied to its racination in the field of art history, and thereby the relinquishing of mastery of the artist-creator and the art historian-knower, threatens dissolution of some dear attachments, including the protection of the mature artist-creator as distinct from her teenage self… or the child playing in the reef and also the field of art as distinct from other twigs in the sand. Allowing the artist to be properly positioned in a field of many others, including non-human actors, and for artworks to enter into relation with other things and processes in the world, means throwing art into relation with other disciplines and modes of knowing the world. When a practice actively invites us to do just this, as is the case with this spiral, it is worth letting the waves crash in, jumble-jostle the pieces some, and retreat in order to discover what remains once the tide has done its part. In 1966, Cecilia Vicuña drew a spiral in the sand on the beach of Concón, along the Pacific coast of Chile: Casa Espiral. It is a spiral and also a house—a Spiral House or a house that spirals. A house indicates a place, a situatedness, a base. A spiral suggests movement, outwards and inwards at once, weaving tightly ever more. This essay considered Casa Espiral as a base from which to consider art’s position in a churning world. Or, rather, it is an effort to mark a different kind of beginning that might continue to spiral. As if it were the start of a different story of artists working in landscapes. As if they were part of them.

Notes 1 For an example of the creation of the spirals, see Cecilia’s 2010 film Kon Kon. 2 This exhibition did not include Vicuña’s work, however. 3 Other writers have discussed Vicuña in relation to, or as differentiated from, land art. See, for instance, Catherine de Zegher, “Cecilia Vicuña’s Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Nots as Knots,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge, 1996), 197–216. De Zegher discusses Vicuña’s early indoor string suspension works in relation to Mario Merz’s indoor string works as existing in tension within the political context in which they were created—thus a similar effort to create art historical counterpoints without resorting to teleology that I am attempting here. Rather than considering Cecilia’s practice as a whole here, my intent is rather to focus on Casa Espiral in order to consider how its prompts might allow us to redirect the consideration of individual artworks as well as make porous the discipline of art history. 4 I must acknowledge my debt to the immense legacy of Linda Nochlin, who allowed these considerations to make their way into art history in the first place. 5 Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 149–150.

54  Sarah Lookofsky 6 I am inspired by Macarena Gomez-Barris’ understanding of a “submerged perspective”. In her book, The Extractive Zone, she asks, “Can we differently attend to Andean, Amazonean, Native life and the complex of senses never fully subsumed within the European colonial order? What cultural and intellectual production makes us see, hear and intimate the land differently? What do we really know about the invisible, the inanimate, and the nonhuman forms that creatively reside as afterlives of the colonial encounter?” (Gómez-Barris, 2017, xx). She thus proposes a “decolonial femme methodology, or a mode of porous and undisciplined analysis shaped by the perspectives and critical genealogies that emerge within these spaces as a mode of doing research” that “lead us out of the deadening impasse that is extractive capitalism, is not bound to the disciplinary drive to claim or master the images or formations I study”. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), xvi. 7 Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” 152. 8 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 149. 9 See, for instance, the 1973 painting Ángel de la menstruación (Menstruation Angel), where the upper- and lower body of the menstruating female figure spiral in opposition directions; the objects composed a multiplicity of found materials Canasta espiral (1986), Espiral de Jezik (1990), Coile (1999), and Cable espiral rojo (2014); the quipu of red wool Vellón espiral (2010); the book of poetry Red Thread: The Story of the Red Thread (Vicuña, Roelstraete, and Nordenflycht Concha, 2017), featuring the poem “The Spiral”, and Instan (2002) and the spiral drawn in sand Erased Spiral (2009). 10 This and other references to the words of the artist, if uncited, are derived from a series of conversations with Cecilia Vicuña in 2018. 11 Gary Urton, Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). 12 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 595, https://doi.org/ 10.2307/3178066. 13 Casa Espiral, and other precarios works, are, as Catherine de Zegher writes, related to prayer: “Prayer understood not as a request, but as a response in a dialogue or a speech that addresses what is (physical) ‘there’ as well as what is ‘not there’ (…) the dialogue as a form of transition from what is to what could be”. Catherine de Zegher, “Cecilia Vicuña’s Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Nots as Knots,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge, 1996), 200. See also Cecilia Vicuña, “Choosing the Feather,” trans. Lorraine O’Grady, Heresies, no. 15 (1982): 18–19. 14 María Cecilia Lozada and Henry Tantaleán, eds., Andean Ontologies: New Archaeological Perspectives (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019). 15 Miguel A López, “Cecilia Vicuña: A Retrospective for Eyes That Do Not See,” in Cecilia Vicuña: See hearing the Enlightened Failure (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2019.), 23. 16 In temporal terms, this understanding typically holds that human activities occur at a quicker clip, while the natural environment is conceived almost as a static backdrop, where shifts occur at a glacial, nearly imperceptible pace. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35 no. 2 (2009): 197–222, https://doi.org/10.1086/596640. As Dipesh Chakrabarty and others argue, the idea of impermeable nature/culture divisions shatter when accepting that humans are bundles of microorganisms and companion species, without which we would cease to exist, and that a relatively short history of capitalist-colonialist-derived emissions are the progenitors of climatic fallout that indeed is beyond human control. 17 https://www.concon.cl/comuna/etimologia-del-nombre.html. 18 http://www.glaciologia.cl/web/glaciologia_es/glaciologiacms/upload/2-318%2010Pellicciotti.pdf. 19 Due to the ownership of the land by the refinery ENAP, archeologists have not had full access to the site. The skeletal remains are believed to be a burial ground from the Bato culture, which was present in the area between 300 BC and 950 AD. See

Winding Up to Be Unfurled 55 “Osamentas halladas en Refinería Aconcagua tendrían cerca de 2000 años de antigüedad,” LA VOZ de Concón (blog), July 26, 2016, https://www.lavozdeconcon.cl/?p=6547. For archaeological history of the Aconcagua valley, see also Rubén Federico Stehberg Landsberger and Gonzalo Sotomayor, “Cabis, guacas-fortalezas y el control incaico del valle de Aconcagua,” Estudios Atacameños (En línea), no. 18 (1999): 237–250, https:// doi.org/10.22199/S07181043.1999.0018.00017. 20 Anna Tsing, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species: For Donna Haraway,” Environmental Humanities, Vol. 1 no. 1 (2012): 144, https://doi.org/10.1215/ 22011919-3610012. 21 “The term ‘plastiglomerate’ refers most specifically to ‘an indurated, multi-composite material made hard by agglutination of rock and molten plastic. (…).’ More poetically, plastiglomerate indexically unites the human with the currents of water; with the breaking down, over millennia, of stone into sand and fossils into oil (...). It shows the ontological inseparability of all matter, from the micro to the macro”. In “Plastiglomerate— Journal #78 December 2016 - e-Flux”, accessed October 17, 2019, https://www.e-flux. com/journal/78/82878/plastiglomerate/. 22 I receive this term from Donna who adopted it from Zoe Sofoulis. 23 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 592. 24 Ibid. 25 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 593. 26 Haraway, 590. 27 My aim here is not to manifest connections between indigenous forms and Cecilia’s work, thereby creating equivalence between her works and ancient precursors or making an argument that risks asserting that these practices are somehow innate to the artist of Mapuche descent. Taking my cue from the work itself, I find it important to allow space for a distinction between Cecilia’s practice and the ancient precedents she is often inspired by. A case in point is the artist’s frequent invocation of the quipu often spelled khipu, the knotted, colourful cord system that dates back to Incan civilizations that is believed to have been a device for purposes as diverse as census, tax, and inventory recording as well as song notation and storytelling (see Urton, Inka History in Knots). Cecilia’s quipus, however, do not resemble the intricate system of knots and strings from which they derive their name; rather, they are typically thick coils of dyed wool, often the size of a human body or even grander in scale. The formal discrepancy speaks volumes, as these works are predicated upon the colonial erasures that have rendered the histories the quipus archive silent. In a similar argument, Macarena Gómez-Barris notes that erasure and reinvention are necessarily imbricated with the impact of colonial encounter (Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone). Relatedly, Andrea Andersson writes that the forms, like the artist herself, are mestiza, the combination of heritages is integral to the work (Andrea Andersson, “Vicuña in Retrospect,” in About to Happen (New York: Siglio Press, 2017). 28 de Zegher, “Cecilia Vicuña’s Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Nots as Knots,” 200–201. 29 See, for instance, Cecilia’s 2010 film Kon Kon, which has as its subject the contemporary presence in Concón of indigenous oral, music, and fishing traditions. 30 Vicuña, “Choosing the Feather,” 18. 31 See, for instance Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” in Radical Thought in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 32 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Peace and Proximity,” in Emmanuel Lévinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 167. 33 Here, too, I am inspired by the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty who, with a background of scholar of postcolonial and subaltern studies, has sought to reckon with the ontological impact that anthropogenic climate change has had on the field, including on concepts such as freedom, (in)justice, and culpability. See Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History”. 34 For extractivism in Latin America, see Eduardo Gudynas, Extractivism: Politics, Economy and Ecology (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2020). Alberto Acosta, “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse,” Beyond Development:

56  Sarah Lookofsky





Alternative Visions from Latin America, ed. Imre Szűcs, (trans. Sara Shields and Rosemary Underhay) (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute/Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2013), 61–86. Maristella Svampa, “Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America,” South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 114 (January 2, 2015): 65–82, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2831290; Maristella Svampa, “Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: Socio-Environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives,” in Elements in Politics and Society in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), https://doi. org/10.1017/9781108752589. 35 For the privatization of water in Chile and environmental resistance movements, see Amal Atrakouti, “Chile Has Entirely Privatised Water, Which Means That Theft Is Institutionalised,” accessed August 13, 2020, https://www.civicus.org/index.php/media-resources/ news/interviews/4271-chile-has-entirely-privatised-water-which-means-that-theft-isinstitutionalised; Luna Follegati, “Violencia Estructural y Feminismo: Apuntes Para Una Discusión,” 2019; Paola Bolados García, “Conflictos socio-ambientales/territoriales y el surgimiento de identidades post neoliberales (Valparaíso-Chile),” Izquierdas, no. 31 (December 2016): 102–129, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-50492016000600102; Paola Bolados and Alejandra Cuevas, “Una Ecología Política Feminista En Construcción: El Caso de Las ‘Mujeres de Zonas de Sacrificio En Resistencia’, Región de Valparaíso, Chile”, Psicoperspectivas. Individuo y Sociedad 16 (July 14, 2017), https://doi.org/10.5027/ psicoperspectivas-Vol16-Issue2-fulltext-977. 36 Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Awareness of Awareness: An Interview with Cecilia Vicuña”, in About to Happen (New York, N.Y.: Siglio Press, 2017), 111. 37 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 4 no. 3 (1998): 469. 38 de Castro, 483.

3

Insubordinate Bodies Staging Protest and Torture in Regina Vater’s 1973 Nós Performance Emily Citino

In 1973, the Brazilian artist Regina Vater (b. 1943, Rio de Janeiro) coordinated with the parks and recreation department in Rio de Janeiro to stage a performance, titled Nós (Knots/We), which she framed to local officials as a children’s activity.1 On Sunday, September 16, Vater brought bundles of rope to Praça Nossa Senhora da Paz (Our Lady of Peace Square) in Ipanema and invited passers-by to handle the rope however they wished. 2 Two photographers, Hugo Denizart and Sérgio da Matta, captured roughly 30 images of participants creatively interacting with the rope, while a psychologist, Halina Grynberg, asked them questions such as “Do you feel tied up?” and “What are the things that tie you up in life?”, which can be heard in a 4-minute audio clip recorded during the event.3 In the photographs, children, women, and men have their heads thrown back in laughter as they use rope to play games, construct swings from tree branches, and bind themselves to one another (Fig. 3.1). Yet, coexisting with these carefree actions are more ominous gestures performed by several adults. One image depicts a woman with her head twisted through a network of rope resembling a spider’s web, as strands of her dark hair are hung loosely over the material (Fig. 3.2). Her position mimics that of prey ensnared inside a predator’s web, though unlike prey that remains in a paralysed state, her untethered body is able to move freely through the netting. In another photograph, a woman’s head appears from the side with her arm pulled in an upwards motion, tightening the rope coiled around her neck. Her grin belies the alarming nature of her gesture even as the tongue sticking out of her mouth exaggeratedly imitates death by strangulation. These images are evidence of how, through this ostensibly playful game, Vater created a space where the public could exercise creative freedom, uninhibited by institutional regulations, while also responding to the repressive atmosphere instilled by the Brazilian military dictatorship in power at the time (1964–1985). One photograph in particular encourages a more explicit interpretation of the potentially menacing features of the rope. A man wrapped tightly with rope stands with his face covered by a beige canvas bag displaying the trademark “Feito no Brasil” (Made in Brazil) (Fig. 3.3). No longer recognisable or able to speak, the man’s only identifiable features are his clothes and black curly hair peeking out from underneath the bag. With his body rendered immobile and defenceless by the rope coiled around him, the unnamed man’s decision to display his body in this concealed, yet public, manner could be read as a sign of the prevalent abuse of citizen’s bodies by the military regime. Throughout this period of the dictatorship, referred to as os anos de chumbo (the leaden years) (1969–1974), the military weaponised rope as an implement of torture to harm and weaken political prisoners.

58  Emily Citino

Figure 3.1  Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins.

The dictatorship in Brazil began on April 1, 1964, when the military removed left-leaning President João Goulart from power in a swift and bloodless coup d’état. Os anos de chumbo refers to the five-year term of General Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969–1974), during which the country experienced an escalation in state violence and persecution. The ratification of the Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) authorised the suspension of basic human rights (habeas corpus), prohibited public demonstrations, and justified the use of torture against political prisoners in the name of national security. Censorship, rampant under President Médici, was wielded to prevent the spread of political dissent and control news of social turmoil across media channels. Middle-class citizens politicised by the dictatorship joined underground networks to challenge and undermine the regime. This shift to collective activism is subtly expressed through the title of the performance, Nós, which translates to both “knots” and “we”, implying a communal bond formed by linking individuals with rope. Although the regime maintained strict control over mass media, artists in Brazil found themselves in a more ambiguous position with regard to censorship. Guidelines around what visual forms artists could produce were not clearly articulated by the regime.4 The visual arts were perceived as being reserved for a limited, elite viewership,

Insubordinate Bodies 59

Figure 3.2  Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins.

and therefore deemed unimportant by officials. Due to the lack of explicitly defined criteria for the visual arts, artists protected themselves through strategies of selfcensorship. Many artists chose to eschew traditional art practices, such as painting or sculpture, in favour of engaging in ephemeral and performative works, often in noninstitutional settings, that concealed evidence of their authorship. Despite Vater’s guarantee to the city that the lively event was for children, the artist later confirmed that the Nós performance was her artistic strategy to challenge institutional and governmental authority, saying “it was really a protest, a very creative [one], you know. And I didn’t tell people how to do [it]; they invented their own way”.5 Despite the rope’s function as a tool of imprisonment and violence, this essay proposes that the manipulation of the material by the participants in Nós gave them a symbolic reprieve from the Brazilian dictatorship. It offers an examination of how the performance circumvented censorship and considers the role of gender as a defining factor, from Vater’s position as organiser, to the large number of women participants, situating these aspects of the piece in the context of gender relations in Brazil in the 1970s. Through this analysis, I argue that Vater’s status as a relatively unknown woman artist allowed her to exploit traditional views of women as passive subjects and evade authoritarian censors, while responding in a public setting to the widespread use of torture. By situating Vater and her performance within the artistic and political environments of Brazil in the 1970s, this exploration of Nós reveals the possibilities for works of art to stage a moment of liberation during a politically repressive moment in Brazilian history.

60  Emily Citino

Figure 3.3  Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins.

Vater and the Nós Paintings After studying painting in the studio of Iberê Camargo, an important Brazilian expressionist painter, and architecture for several years at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in 1964, Vater held her first solo exhibition, which featured oil and watercolour landscapes, at the Alpendre Gallery in Rio de Janeiro.6 Vater continued to paint throughout the 1960s, receiving notable recognition in 1968 for her representations of women in the style of Nova Figuração (new figuration). An artistic movement in Brazil during the 1960s, Nova Figuração shifted away from the geometric abstraction of the previous generation of artists and instead emphasised figurative representation. In Vater’s figurative prints and paintings, women’s bodies appear nude and headless against brightly coloured beachscapes. As Brazilian art historian Talita Trizoli has noted, the women in Vater’s Nova Figuração paintings are passive, sexualised objects placed within “landscapes of desire”.7 Through this body of work, Vater wished to visually communicate the sexist treatment she encountered as a young woman navigating a male-dominated art scene in Rio de Janeiro.8 In 1968, Vater received the first prize in the Salon of Brazilian Drawing for her presentation of 50 works featuring this imagery.9 She also participated in two São

Insubordinate Bodies 61 Paulo Biennials in 1967 and 1969. The latter included her interactive sculpture Mulher Mutante (Mutant Woman) (1968).10 Made entirely of painted wood, Mulher Mutante depicts a deconstructed woman’s body rising out of a box built to resemble a miniature bed. The viewer is allowed to touch and handle the woman’s fragmented legs, arms, head, and breasts. Vater’s first venture into performance art occurred in 1970 on Joatinga Beach, an isolated beach in Rio de Janeiro, far from the bustle of Copacabana and Ipanema. Titled Magi(o)cean, the performance involved Vater and friends assembling an altar of candles, stones, and detritus found on the beach, which they dedicated to Ogun and Oxumaré, deities belonging to the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. After the rising ocean tide destroyed the altar, Vater sent photographic documentation to the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio), but her submission was rejected as installation and instead accepted as photography. Vater later said this classification by MAM-Rio caused her to abandon further experimental practices and return to painting.11 The work that she developed during these initial years of her career demonstrates her dedication to exploring themes of gendered subjectivity, spirituality, and the environment, through both traditional and ephemeral artistic strategies. Over the next two years, Vater lived in São Paulo and found opportunities in advertising, graphic design, and teaching. She began to experiment with her paintings by incorporating depictions of women tied with rope, which prefigure the Nós performance in 1973.12 In Triptíco Nós (Triptych Knots) (1972), a woman’s nude torso bound by white rope floats across an abstracted beachscape featuring nebulous shapes painted in greens, blues, and yellows (Fig. 3.4). The colour palette evokes that of the Brazilian national flag, and the beach scene, though difficult to make out, can be viewed as Rio de Janeiro, with the emerging mountainous forms resembling the city’s iconic geography. With her missing head and the colour drained from her body, the woman appears as a lifeless corpse unable to control the sway of the rope. Though the subject matter in Triptíco Nós can be associated with themes of sexuality and erotic bondage, Vater has stated that her decision to portray the nude woman as headless and “suffocated” by knots was due to women “not being allowed to think” in Brazil.13 This iconography expresses a dynamic in which women lack control, and power is held by an invisible force guiding the rope, symbolic of the social limitations felt by Brazilian women during this time. One such societal burden was the explicit message that women centre their lives around marriage and motherhood, something that Vater decidedly rebelled against even as she was raised in a traditional, middle-class family.14 Furthermore, even when women entered political spaces, joining militant resistance groups opposing the dictatorship, they were assigned tasks ranging from engaging in armed combat to performing domestic labour, such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children.15 In an article from Jornal do Brasil, dated February 10, 1969, and titled “Exposição Tropicalista, Pintura de Mulher” (Tropicalist Exhibition, Painting of Woman), Vater stated that as a woman living in the twentieth century, she is part of an ongoing endeavour to emancipate women from the confining roles of partner and mother.16 She argued that “in the dynamic world in which we live, there is nothing sadder than being a passive agent of society”.17 Vater further elucidated on her struggles as a woman artist by characterising the art scene, she first encountered in Rio de Janeiro as a “boys club” that was difficult to infiltrate, occupied by artists such as Carlos Vergara, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman, specifically recalling that Gerchman,

62  Emily Citino

Figure 3.4  Regina Vater, Triptíco Nós, panel 1, 1972, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins.

a painter and sculptor belonging to the Nova Figuração movement, treated her in an “ironic way, like I was never going to succeed”.18 Vater’s assertion of her identity as a woman artist is particularly notable, as gendered or feminist themes were not necessarily embraced by women artists during this time. Feminism as a political movement did not gain traction in Brazil until the mid1970s, coinciding with the first commemoration of the International Women’s Year conference in Brazil and the establishment of the Movimento Feminino pela Anistia (Feminine movement for amnesty) (MFPA) in 1975.19 Before then, self-identified feminists were generally interpreted, throughout Latin America, as “‘agents of Yankee imperialism’ by the left, as ‘criminal abortionists’ on the right, and as ‘lesbian antimales’ by the mass media”.20 It was not until the dawn of abertura in the mid-1970s, when the authority of the dictatorship weakened and democracy was slowly restored, that feminism grew in popularity among citizens and grassroots organisations. Triptíco Nós bears a strong visual resemblance to the painting series Campos de batalha (Battlefields) (1973–1974) by the Brazilian artist Antônio Henrique Amaral (b. 1935; d. 2015, São Paulo), which depict bananas wrapped tightly with rope and in varying states of decay. Interestingly, the visual relationship between Vater’s and Amaral’s paintings is not coincidental. Though Vater does not name Amaral directly, she recalls showing this body of work to a colleague of hers in Brazil and that she later reconnected with this same artist in New York in 1973, and was “shocked” to see

Insubordinate Bodies 63 that he had begun to produce paintings with similar knotted iconography. 21 Vater’s statements correspond to Amaral’s trajectory, as he received the Foreign Travel Prize at the Twentieth National Salon of Modern Art in 1971, which allowed him to travel to New York where he developed his paintings of bound bananas. Similar to the ways in which Amaral’s paintings call attention to the violence suffered by the Brazilian population at the hands of the dictatorship, with critics interpreting the bananas to be representative of an abused human body, Vater’s portrayal of a contorted female body twisting through tightly knotted rope, almost fading amidst the national colours, directs the viewer to consider the particular forms of oppression felt by women under both a patriarchal and authoritarian society. 22 In 1972, Vater received the Foreign Travel Prize at the Twenty-First National Salon of Modern Art from MAM-Rio. 23 With the financial assistance provided by this prestigious award, Vater made plans to travel to New York City in September 1973. It was just before leaving on this trip that Vater made a brief stop in Rio de Janeiro to translate her paintings into a public performance. In order to prevent police intervention during the Nós performance, a distinct probability given the heightened suspicion a public gathering would arouse, Vater sought permission from the city’s parks and recreation department, advertising the performance as an “afternoon of creativity for children”.24 Local officials approved Vater’s request and scheduled the activity to occur during a 3-hour slot in Praça Nossa Senhora da Paz. Vater’s reputation as a little-known artist with an oeuvre largely composed of paintings of peculiar representations of rope and inoffensive beach scenes likely contributed to Vater’s success in receiving permission. Rather than engaging in a direct critique of the dictatorship or art institutions and risking police interference, Vater adhered to institutional regulations to shield the performance under the protective mantle of bureaucracy. Also, her previous experience teaching public art classes in São Paulo likely strengthened her proposal, as an art teacher requesting a space for a children’s activity would have generated little scrutiny from officials. This is significant as teaching was often a way for women artists in Latin America to subtly enter the political and activist circles from which they were excluded.25 Women artists hosted workshops within studios, museums, and the outdoors, transforming the site of art production into a space of unrestrained experiential learning. The Nós performance features people of all ages, races, and genders, providing them each with the opportunity to assume active roles in the manipulation of the rope. The infectious enthusiasm of the participants in Nós surfaces in each of the photographs, evident in their uninhibited actions and candid smiles, while laughter emerges in their conversations with the interviewer. Unlike the Nós paintings, in which women are deprived of agency and bound by rope, the performance depends upon the active contribution of women. The surviving photographs depict a largely female crowd at the square, possibly due to the number of families and young couples roaming the area, though it remains unclear if Vater anticipated this demographic, and capture women participants rotating between active and passive roles, tightening and loosening the rope around their bodies (Fig. 3.5). Vater’s use of traditional views of women to her advantage in obtaining bureaucratic consent for her performance consequently empowered her to use the performance to subvert the gender-specific constraints imposed by Brazilian society. Furthermore, the actions of the women in the performance evoke the integral roles played by women in the resistance to the dictatorship.

64  Emily Citino

Figure 3.5  Regina Vater, Nós, 1973. Photo credit: Hugo Denizart and Sergio da Matta. Courtesy of Regina Vater and Galeria Jaqueline Martins.

Untying the Knot: A Response to Institutional Torture Women occupied a variety of positions within leftist organisations and extremist guerrilla groups during the military dictatorship, thereby entering male-dominated political circles.26 Though women were imprisoned and subjected to sexual violence by military police, issues of gender and gender-specific violence were downplayed as distractions from the goal of challenging the dictatorship, and as disruptive to the opposition’s united front. Yet, to the extent that the male torturer actively commits violence against the passive female prisoner, and women were neither employed as torturers nor as military police officers, the context of torture adheres inherently to traditional notions of gender. Torturers informed female prisoners that their experiences of sexual violence served to debilitate their male partners who were also held captive.27 Further, captors perceived their female prisoners as “feminists who deserved to be tortured” for daring to rebel against the societal gender roles assigned to women.28 Just as Vater’s Triptíco Nós painting can be read as an indictment of the social restrictions and state violence inflicted upon women, the performance extends the implications of this analysis by exploring the possibilities of freedom afforded to the participants through the symbol of the knot. In an interview with the newspaper Última Hora, dated July 27, 1972, Vater discussed the various symbols associated with the knot in her work. She asserted that the knot “acts, ties, impedes, stings, and imprisons, but when it is good, it becomes a bond. It is necessary to untie the knots and to conserve the bonds”. 29 Her concept of the knot evokes a sense of solidarity between those physically linked together. News of the use of torture in Brazil spread throughout international media by the late 1960s, due in part to the exile in 1969 of 15 political prisoners to Mexico, where

Insubordinate Bodies 65 they released details of their imprisonment at the hands of the military.30 During interrogations, military officials alternated between interrogating and inflicting pain upon their prisoners. These traumatic events occurred in a range of sites, such as the Tiradentes prison and the former psychiatric hospital, Juquery, in São Paulo. The military used prisoners as guinea pigs in classes arranged by the military in which officers learned new techniques of torture.31 In fact, the Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV) (National Truth Commission), in a detailed report published in 2014 on the human rights violations committed by the dictatorship, revealed that the United States trained Brazilian police on methods of torture.32 This admission is not surprising, given the clandestine role the United States played in the 1964 military coup. Declassified documents from the National Security Archives (NSA) divulge how the United States, determined to prevent the expansion of communism following the Cuban Revolution (1953–1959), backed the takeover by providing financial support and arms shipments in an affair known as Operation Brother Sam.33 The prevalent weaponisation of rope links together many public accounts of torture in Brazil during this time. One of the most widespread methods of torture is known as the Parrot’s Perch, in which prisoners were hung upside down from an iron bar by their knees, as their wrists were by tightly secured by rope. Caught in a strained position and unable to defend themselves, these victims were vulnerable to attacks all over their bodies.34 Prisoners were also stripped of their clothing, bound with rope, attached to wooden beams, and forced to raise their arms for significant amounts of time. Referred to as the “Jesus Christ” or “Christ the Redeemer”, due to similarities in their infamously rigid and elongated poses, this painful stance was meant to strain and dislocate abdominal muscles.35 In Nós, the appearance of the national trademark “Feito no Brasil” alludes to this institutionalisation of torture through its suggestion that torture and other forms of oppression were Brazilianmade products during this time. In her seminal text “Margins and Institutions: Performances of the Chilean Avanzada”, the cultural theorist Nelly Richard posits the body as an effective vehicle for circumventing censorship in oppressive contexts.36 Whereas language and other modes of communication are scrutinised by the watchful eye of censors, the body serves an important function in exposing the tension between the individual and an autocratic state. Postulating the body as the “domain of the unsayable”, Richard proposes that corporeal gestures engaging in political critique are better able to escape censors than other avenues of communication.37 The participants in Nós maneuver their bodies into uncomfortable positions to impersonate episodes of torture, with many of them switching between roles of victim and perpetrator. The control they maintain throughout the performance converges into a moment of individual agency and resistance. An interrogative tone emerges from the questions Grynberg poses to the participants as they consider whether they feel restrained in their daily lives.38 The extent of collaboration between Grynberg and Vater in formulating the interview portion of the performance is unclear, though Grynberg’s background as a child psychologist likely contributed to their methods of investigation.39 Generally, the participants offered vague answers, acknowledging that they felt restricted or tired in their lives but stopping short of pinpointing the causes.40 The majority expressed amazement that the activity had generated a large crowd on such short notice, and admiration for the children’s unabashed enthusiasm. As news of the violent persecution faced by

66  Emily Citino those challenging the dictatorship circulated among the Brazilian population, specifically university students, academics, musicians, writers, and artists, it is possible that participants belonging to these groups felt uneasy describing the restrictive forces in their lives. In the 1971 documentary Brazil: A Report on Torture, directed by Saul Landau and Haskell Wexler, interviews with former political prisoners shed light on the psychological impact of interrogations. The subjects detail their experiences of being tortured even after they made it clear that they had no information to offer their captors.41 Unlike these interrogative strategies, where detainees navigate treacherous terrain to avoid bodily harm, Grynberg’s open-ended inquiries allowed the participants to examine the depths of their psyches without fearing punishment. Grynberg’s mode of questioning succeeded in part due to the performance’s site—a welcoming, sun-lit public square—a stark contrast to a dark room populated by aggressive military officials and instruments of pain. In addressing these repressed thoughts, the participants articulated with their bodies what they would not voice out loud. Through their vague responses and tense poses, it is evident that many of the participants were engaging in self-censorship to avoid provoking surveillance. While the participants explored how to communicate the topics rendered unspeakable by the regime, Denizart and da Matta’s decisions to capture these particular creative actions support the assertion that participants were alluding to authoritarian practices of torture and censorship. It is unclear if any of the performers were directly aware of Vater’s intention to structure the performance as a response to the dictatorship, yet their deliberate photographic choices suggest an implicit spirit of collaboration among the photographers, the performers, and Vater herself. Despite the spontaneous nature of the performance, there appears to be a certain level of planning behind the rope creations devised by the young adults. These particular endeavours reinforce the interpretation that the participants, while surrendering their voices to censorship, physically performed scenes of torture as a strategy of resistance.

Performance as Protest Central to the Nós performance’s potential for providing a space of liberation is the element of social engagement among Vater, her team, and the public. By collapsing the traditional distance between artist and spectator, the performance aligned itself with the principles of Neo-Concrete Art. Ascendant during the 1960s in Rio de Janeiro, the movement championed art that eschewed institutions and encouraged collaborations with society. The “Manifesto Neoconcreto” (Neoconcrete Manifesto) (1959), written by the leading voice of the movement, the visual poet Ferreira Gullar, explores the bodily implications of the concept of phenomenology with regard to art production.42 Grounded in the theories of the French philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty, phenomenology emphasises how the unique experiences of an individual shape their interactions with and perceptions of their surrounding environments. Leading Neo-Concrete artists, such as Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel, and Lygia Pape, all of whom have been widely written about and exhibited, centred the body in their work, emphasising freedom of expression and experiential practices over the traditional art object.43 The structure of Nós has a particularly compelling correspondence to the work of Lygia Pape. From 1967 to 1968, Pape organised a series of performances in Rio

Insubordinate Bodies 67 de Janeiro titled Divisor (Divider), in which she brought a white cloth, measuring 30 × 30 m with equidistant holes cut into the fabric, to children residing in the Chácara da Cabeça favela, and invited them to put their heads through the openings and walk through the city.44 Pape’s Divisor questions the spatial relationship between bodies as they move through their environment, a key concern for the Neo-Concrete artists, while also framing this unified march as a mobile monument to those affected by the dictatorship.45 Divisor engages children as the main performers, just as Nós does, and is likely a reason why Pape’s work was similarly not censored by police. The resemblances between the two works indicate Vater’s critical grasp of how NeoConcrete artists used performances as a way to interrogate social and political perceptions of space. By the end of the 1960s, Neo-Concrete artists struggled to continue their work in Brazil, with Gullar exiled for his outspoken criticisms of the dictatorship, Pape arrested and tortured in 1973, and others having fled the country.46 The contributions of Neo-Concrete artists to the development of performance art in the 1960s and 1970s should not be underestimated. The optimistic belief in performance art as a viable artistic strategy for facilitating the intersection of art and life, and thus revolutionising everyday life, can be observed in many prominent Neo-Concrete works.47 Vater’s Nós performance, despite its oppressive political context, retains some of the optimistic spirit of Neo-Concrete art by adhering to the movement’s core principles of active and sensorial participation, and breaching the barrier between art and life. Vater originally planned to hold the Nós performance in 1972 at the corner of Rua Direita and São Bento, two streets in the busy economic centre of São Paulo. She intended to hang rope between buildings opposite each other, ensnaring whoever walked on the street at that moment, most likely employees from nearby banks and government agencies.48 It was at the urging of Walter Zanini, the esteemed director of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo (1963–1978), that Vater abandoned her proposal.49 Zanini considered Vater’s ideas to be too dangerous to carry out, believing the artist would be reprimanded for causing interference in this important district. It is possible Zanini was aware of a previous incident from 1967 in which two artists, Nelson Leirner and Flávio Motta, hung large flags between Avenida Paulista and Europa, a similarly bustling economic site in São Paulo, in an installation titled Bandeiras na Praça (Flags in the Square).50 The police regarded the event as a public disturbance and cancelled the performance. Interestingly, the artists were able to arrange a second display of Bandeiras na Praça the following year in Rio de Janeiro, which is indicative of the arbitrary nature of the dictatorship’s responses to the visual arts. There appears to have been a considerable gap between the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro plans for the Nós performance. The São Paulo proposal’s tactic of unexpectedly entangling those on the street comes across as less welcoming and more confrontational than the approach taken in Rio de Janeiro. Additionally, as military police and officials populated the area, the São Paulo version could be viewed as an attempt at making the dictatorship look foolish. In preparing for Nós in Rio de Janeiro, Vater acquired state permission and avoided imbuing the performance with an overtly political tone. She recalls approaching children and their families at the square first and asking them to play with the rope.51 After seeing the children relishing the unlimited possibilities the simple material afforded, adults and groups of friends joined in.

68  Emily Citino Through the connective process of participants tying themselves to each other, as captured in several of the photographs, a collective body in protest emerges. Straying from the traditional concept of a “finished” artwork, the Nós performance functions as an open-ended proposal that encompasses a multitude of possible interactions between the participants and the rope. Vater’s emphasis on impromptu action is also no doubt influenced by the critical writings of Frederico Morais, one of the most distinguished Brazilian curators and art critics, who in 1970 wrote the influential essay “Contra a arte afluente: o corpo é o motor da ‘obra’” (Against Affluent Art: The Body is the Engine of the “Work”). Morais declared that the artist “is not the one who performs or realises the work, but proposes situations, which must be lived, experienced”.52 He argued that contemporary artists should apply similar strategies to those of guerrilla fighters, behaving in unanticipated ways to “ambush” the public and motivate them to act.53 The people in the square on the day of the performance encountered an unexpected situation encouraging them to explore the potential of rope. As noted earlier, Vater and her team did not prescribe how the rope should be used, but granted the participants full autonomy to act on their innovative ideas. The events of Nós were discussed in two separate newspaper articles the week after the performance. In a column in Jornal do Brasil titled “Regina Vater, Desata o nó” (Regina Vater, Untie the Knot), dated September 21, 1973, Vater described how the performance materialised with the help of Denizart, da Matta, and Grynberg, and lamented that her upcoming travel plans to New York City would forestall her ability to continue with more variations of Nós in Brazil. 54 An article titled “O nó a caminho do laço” (The Knot in the Loop’s Path) in O Globo, dated September 26, 1973, elaborated on the choice of material, stating that Vater transformed knotted rope from a symbol of restraint into an emblem of imagination and resourcefulness. 55 Both articles offer accounts of Nós that focus on the creative character of the performance, though the latter article briefly hints at rope as an instrument of confinement. The coverage of Vater’s performance in published newspaper articles is noteworthy given the regulations the press faced during os anos de chumbo. Sanctions were placed on newspaper reports, radio transmissions, and television broadcasts, although the impositions these rulings enacted were often arbitrary.56 Censorship was imposed on instances of public communication that were deemed offensive to “moral and proper behavior”, or harmful to national security. 57 The deliberate choice to advertise Nós as a playful afternoon for children obscured the artist’s motivation—to stage a critique of the government. Vater’s ingenious decision to disguise her performance as an afternoon of children’s entertainment protected Nós from governmental intervention, allowing it to serve, among other things, as an impromptu public protest.

Conclusion In a 2018 interview, Vater proposes that her absence from the canon of Brazilian art stems from her presence as an independent and feminist persona in a patriarchal society, along with the difficulty of classifying her work in relation to a particular medium or art historical movement.58 Despite her exclusion, Vater’s work from the 1970s exemplifies the artistic tendencies informing performance art of the time. Like earlier Neo-Concrete performances, Nós conveys an optimistic tone, a belief in the capability of artworks to bridge the divide between art and life and to initiate social

Insubordinate Bodies 69 change. And Vater’s position as a woman artist navigating artistic and political environments dominated by men should not be underestimated. Propelled by the patriarchal view of women as passive subjects, it is likely that government officials saw no conceivable reason to reject Vater, a gallery painter and art teacher, in her request to host a children’s activity in a public square. Through the public’s reimagining of the violence perpetrated by the military regime, the participants experienced a symbolic moment of autonomy over their bodies, a power stolen from them by the state. Vater’s performance emphasised freedom of expression, while evading censors on the ground level and sneaking into newspaper reports that avoided overtly political interpretations. To this day, the Nós performance remains one of the few artworks to have successfully publicly protested the human rights abuses committed by the dictatorship without any reprisal from government officials. Vater’s Nós reveals how women artists subverted patriarchal conceptions of femininity in order to enter activist and political circles, creating an effective strategy of resistance under the Brazilian military dictatorship.

Notes 1 This essay is drawn from the author’s MA thesis on Vater. Refer to Emily Citino, “Staging Torture and Protest in Regina Vater’s 1973 Nós Performance” (MA Thesis, University of Utah, 2019). 2 Cary Cordova, “Oral history interview with Regina Vater,” interview by Cary Cordova, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, February 23–25, 2004, accessed October 17, 2018, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interviewregina-vater-12290. 3 The audio and photographs of Nós were obtained from Galeria Jaqueline Martins, the São Paulo–based gallery that represents Vater along with other Brazilian artists prominent during the 1970s, including Letícia Parente, Martha Araújo, and Hudinilson Jr. To listen to the audio, refer to https://vimeo.com/294945494, accessed October 17, 2018. 4 Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 18. 5 Cordova, “Oral history interview with Regina Vater.” 6 Paula Alzugaray, “Regina Vater: Four Ecologies,” in Regina Vater: Quatro Ecologias, ed. Paula Alzugaray and Oi Futuro Flamengo (Rio de Janeiro, BR: Oi Futuro, 2013), 28. 7 Talita Trizoli, “Trajetórias de Regina Vater: Por uma crítica feminista da arte brasileira” (MA Thesis, University of São Paulo, 2011), 80. 8 Cynthia Garcia, “A Maverick Life: Exploring the Radical Art of Regina Vater,” accessed March 3, 2019, https://www.newcitybrazil.com/2018/12/11/a-maverick-lifeexploring-the-radical-art-of-regina-vater/. 9 “Regina Vater-artista da vanguarda,” Diário da Tarde, July 4, 1968, unpaginated, Regina Vater Artist File, São Paulo Biennial Foundation. 10 For an image of Mulher Mutante, see https://www.select.art.br/regina-vater-mulhermutante/. 11 Alzugaray, “Regina Vater: Four Ecologies,” 28. 12 It is not known how many paintings Vater produced with this knotted imagery. For detailed information on Vater’s paintings, see Talita Trizoli, “Atravessamentos Feministas: um panorama de mulheres artistas no Brasil dos anos 60/70” (PhD Diss., University of São Paulo, 2018). 13 Garcia, “A Maverick Life.” 14 Cordova, “Oral history interview with Regina Vater.” 15 Olivia Rangel Joffily, Esperança equilibrista: Resistência feminina à ditadura militar no Brasil (Florianópolis, BR: Editora Insular, 2016), 95.

70  Emily Citino 16 “Exposição Tropicalista, Pintura de Mulher,” Jornal do Brasil, February 10, 1969, 5, Regina Vater Artist File, São Paulo Biennial Foundation. 17 Ibid. 18 Cordova, “Oral history interview with Regina Vater.” 19 Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016), 113. 20 Marta Lamas, “Identity as Women?: The Dilemma of Latin American Feminism,” in Being América: Essays on Art, Literature, and Identity from Latin America, ed. Rachel Weiss (New York, NY: White Pine Press, 1991), 132. 21 Ibid. 22 For an in-depth analysis of Amaral’s Campos de batalha paintings, refer to Margaret H. Adams, “Antonio Henrique Amaral’s Battlefield Paintings and the Brazilian Military Dictatorship,” ICAA Documents Working Papers 6, accessed February 18, 2020, https:// icaa.mfah.org/s/en/page/icaa-working-papers-number-6. 23 “Salão de Arte Moderna dá prêmios de viagem a Regina Vater e Newton Cavalcânti,” Jornal do Brasil, September 26, 1972, unpaginated, Regina Vater Artist File, São Paulo Biennial Foundation. 24 Cordova, “Oral history interview with Regina Vater.” 25 The scholarship on women artists in Latin America engaging in experimental pedagogic practices continues to be developed, as evidenced by the ongoing research project Artists and Radical Education in Latin America (1960/1970) by art historians Cristiana Tejo, Margarida Brito Alves, and Giulia Lamoni, at NOVA University Lisbon. The Brazilian artists Anna Bella Geiger and Celeida Tostes are included in this project for their contributions to participatory education, such as Geiger’s beach workshops on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, (Circumambulatio) (Circumambulation) (1972), and Tostes’ ceramic classes at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, also in Rio de Janeiro. 26 Perhaps the most well-known female militant is Dilma Rousseff, the former Brazilian president (2011–2016). During the 1960s, Rousseff held high-ranking positions in the Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária Palmares a Marxist guerrilla organisation. Rousseff was arrested and tortured in the headquarters of Operação Bandeirante, a clandestine political agency that oversaw torture and tracked activities of their opponents. Joffily, Esperança equilibrista, 95. 27 Ibid., 100. 28 Mariana Joffily, “Sexual Violence in the Military Dictatorships of Latin America: Who Wants to Know?,” SUR: International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 13, no. 24 (2016), accessed October 17, 2018, https://sur.conectas.org/en/who-wants-to-know/. 29 “Regina, a arte é um nó,” Última Hora, July 27, 1972, unpaginated, Regina Vater Artist File, São Paulo Biennial Foundation. 30 James Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 148. 31 Archdiocese of São Paulo, comp. Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture by Brazilian Military Governments, 1964–1979, trans. Jaime Wright, ed. Joan Dassin (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998), 13–15. 32 Comissão Nacional da Verdade, Relatório da Comissão Nacional da Verdade: Volume I (Brasília, BR: Presidência da República, December 2014), accessed January 23, 2019, http://cnv.memoriasreveladas.gov.br/images/pdf/relatorio/volume_1_digital.pdf. 33 “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup: Declassified Documents Shed Light on U.S. Involvement,” The National Security Archive, accessed November 15, 2019, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/. 34 Archdiocese of São Paulo, comp. Torture in Brazil, 16. 35 Ibid., 23–24. 36 Nelly Richard, “Margins and Institutions: Performances of the Chilean Avanzada,” in Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, ed. Coco Fusco (London, UK: Routledge, 2000), 203–217. 37 Ibid., 215. 38 Alzugaray, “Regina Vater: Four Ecologies,” 30.

Insubordinate Bodies 71 39 There is little information available on Grynberg’s career. She published a book in 1999 on parental strategies for dealing with teenage drug abuse, and a book in 2011 on the life and musical stylings of her husband, the Brazilian saxophonist Paulo Moura. 40 See https://vimeo.com/294945494. 41 Brazil: A Report on Torture, directed by Saul Landau and Haskell Wexler, 1971. 42 Ferreira Gullar, “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” Jornal do Brasil, March 21, 1959, ICAA Record ID: 1110328. Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art. International Center for the Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX. 43 Such scholarship includes Ronaldo Brito, Neoconcretismo: Vértice e Ruptura do Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro (São Paulo, BR: Edições Cosac & Naify, 1999), Sérgio B. Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil (1949–1979) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), and Irene V. Small, Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 44 Iris Candela, “The Risk of Invention,” in Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms, ed. Iris Candela (New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017), 10. 45 Ibid., 11. 46 See Gillian Sneed, “‘Nossos Homens em Nova Iorque’: Brazilian Women in New York,” in Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered, 1967–1978, ed. Harper Montgomery (New York, NY: Hunter College of the City of New York, 2012), 26–29. 47 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 13. 48 Alzugaray, “Regina Vater: Four Ecologies,” 30. 49 I received information regarding Vater’s first outline of the Nós performance, including Zanini’s advice, from Galeria Jaqueline Martins. 50 Calirman, Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, 19. 51 Cordova, “Oral history interview with Regina Vater.” 52 In the essay, Morais discusses the work of Lygia Clark, Luiz Alphonsus, Guilherme Vaz, and Cildo Meireles. Frederico Morais, “Contra a arte afluente: o corpo é o motor da “obra”,” Revista de Cultura Vozes, Vol. 1 no. 64 (January/February 1970): 45–59. 53 Ibid., 49. 54 “Regina Vater, Desata o nó,” Jornal do Brasil, September 21, 1973, 4, Regina Vater Artist File, São Paulo Biennial Foundation. 55 “O nó a caminho do laço,” O Globo, September 26, 1973, unpaginated, Regina Vater Artist File, São Paulo Biennial Foundation. 56 Shtromberg, Art Systems, 44. 57 Ibid., 44. 58 Garcia, “A Maverick Life.”

4

Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev The Nomadic Tent Between “Worlds” Ceren Özpınar

In October 1973, a life-size, Asian-style round tent appeared in the exhibition area of ARC (Animation-Recherche-Confrontation), one of the few departments of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in France that primarily focused on contemporary art. When the display opened to the public, this installation, called Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt; literally Round House), which was created by the Turkish visual artist Nil Yalter (b. 1938) for her first solo show in the city, piqued the art world’s curiosity. An Istanbulite and self-proclaimed Marxist-feminist who settled in Paris in 1965, Yalter modelled Topak Ev after the dwelling houses of the nomadic communities of central Anatolia. The circular, bell-shaped tent, measuring three metres in diameter, was supported by a light aluminium frame and wrapped in large panels of industrial felt, animal skin, and wool (Fig. 4.1). The materials enveloped the entire structure except for a small space for an oculus at its top and an opening that served as a door. Pleats of textile, painted pieces of fringed sheepskin, and felt hung on both the inside and the outside of it. A long passage from a Turkish novel and a quotation from a Russian poet in French were handwritten on its exterior. Inside, a piece of fabric was laid out on the floor with some food that the artist placed there for show.1 Prior to the making of Topak Ev, Yalter had carefully studied the temporary dwellings of nomads, spending a long research period at Musée de l’Homme, the anthropology museum in Paris. The ethnologist Bernard Dupaigne, an expert on Asian cultures, informed Yalter’s research and prepared her for the fieldwork that she undertook in early 1973 in the city of Niğde in central Turkey. Yalter’s time there was devoted to observing the everyday life of the nomadic community and recording their inherited practices with her sketches. Transformed into elaborate, colourful drawings on her return to Paris, these sketches were illustrated on a dozen wall panels that were displayed with the tent. A form of traditional housing of Anatolian nomadic communities, the round tent has had a pervasive presence across Eurasia for centuries. Its existence in the Anatolian peninsula was known not only to locals but also to state officials and British travellers who have documented encounters with them since the early nineteenth century. 2 The nomadic Bektik community that Yalter visited is a part of the primary nomadic group called the Turkmens (or Turcomans), who have historically lived in Anatolia—the second-largest nomadic group comprised the Kurds—and who lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle: keeping flocks and herds and living in round tents.3 A considerable amount of literature has been published on Topak Ev since Yalter first displayed the work at ARC. Reading it as an encapsulation of the social and family systems within which the Anatolian nomadic woman is believed to live, most

Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev  73

Figure 4.1  Nil Yalter, Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt) and Nil Yalter on the right, 1973, metal structure, industrial felt, animal skin, wool, leather, text, mixed media, 98 × 118 in. (249 × 300 cm). Photo credit: Mayotte Magnus Levinska. Image courtesy of the artist and Arter Collection, Istanbul.

studies to date have tended to interpret the work as a critical commentary on the patriarchal oppression of women, an approach that fails to appreciate the extent to which Topak Ev works to unsettle mainstream feminist characterisations of the “nomadic woman” as a signifier of a monolithic category of powerless tribal women. To the degree that it offers a glimpse into a world in which an unexpectedly diverse approach to women’s role in society exists, I would argue that Topak Ev enfolds an alternative perspective on the experiences of the nomadic subject. There has also been little discussion about the ways in which Topak Ev foregrounds the history and the legacy of nomadic peoples in the Anatolian plateau, a tribal “native” culture that has existed for centuries in the geographical region now called Turkey. In light of Yalter’s own émigré status in France, studies have tended to interpret the nomadic tent as signifying immigration as an international issue, misconstruing the work’s articulation of nomadic life as the artist’s proposed solution to migration. Yet, there is more to be said regarding what underlies the artist intent by inserting this most definitive, customary element of nomadic life into a foreign place far away from its native land. In this essay, I engage Yalter’s nomadic tent as a site that connects the transnational “worlds” in which she has participated, a connection that cuts across multiple countries, political histories, and personal narratives. Borrowing from María Lugones, I use the notion of “world” in this context to signal the significance of the artist’s travels to other people’s communities as a way of loving and identifying with them. Yalter’s movements also enabled her to see diverse worlds, which eventually changed her understanding of her own experiences, leading her to perceive the nomad’s “world” differently.4 The context of the cultural and social climate of the 1960s, the decade marked by Yalter’s liaisons in Istanbul, is seen as key to the artist’s

74  Ceren Özpınar impetus in creating Topak Ev, and my analysis of the nexus of political and feminist concerns that informed her radical standpoint will unpack the motivations that led her to address the situation of nomads in Anatolia within the context of 1970s Paris. By investigating specific elements of Topak Ev, such as the inscriptions and the collaged panels, to elucidate the histories of violence, displacement, and loss that it signals, which concern nomads as well as Kurdish communities, I finally consider the creation of Topak Ev as an act of resistance and remembrance that stands to confront engrained trans-local conflicts in the Anatolian geography.

Inside the Tent: Saving the Nomadic Woman As deeply researched and culturally specific as it is, Topak Ev is also connected to broader debates around gender and transnational artistic trends in the 1960s and 1970s, in which the tent came to be brandished as a symbol of politically liberated forms of community and relationality. Italian artists Mario Merz and Carla Accardi both imagined alternatives to the strenuous political tensions in Italy around this time by developing structures inspired by nomadic tents.5 Accardi, in particular, reconsidered the tent as a study of home and an exploration of new ideas for cohabitation. As Teresa Kittler suggests, Accardi’s work from this period stands “as a symbol of protest and resistance against what was viewed as the dominant form of society… an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo”.6 With a view to developing a mode of living differently, Accardi’s tent-based works—such as Tenda (1965)—reflected her curiosity about women’s diverse ways of living in other cultures, coinciding with her involvement in the feminist movement in 1960s Italy. Correspondingly, in the 1970s French cultural context in which Topak Ev was exhibited, the work deeply and immediately resonated with the feminist debates of the time to the extent that its critique was perceived to be addressing the issue of women’s gendered role as homemaker, and it accordingly attracted the attention of international feminist art circles. After Topak Ev was exhibited at ARC, it continued to circulate in the cultural hotspots of France and Germany for a few years. In 1980, critic Lucy R. Lippard invited Yalter to take part in her major exhibition, Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, which brought together a number of contemporary women artists. In the 2000s, when renewed attention to women’s art and feminism around the world was marked by numerous high-profile exhibitions, Yalter’s early work was once again sought after and she was invited to participate in exhibitions including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) in Los Angeles and The Feminist Avant-Gardes of the 1970s in the Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna (2010). While these exhibitions and several studies have recognised Yalter’s formative position in the constellation of artists whose work has been informed by feminisms, they have primarily framed Topak Ev as a work that references female confinement, and as a metaphor for the “cultural hegemony over woman’s body, … a skin, … a sort of womb in which woman lives”.7 In this accounting, the artist herself has often been described as the “claimant of artistic nomadism, that of women traveling between archaic sources and the world of their time”.8 Yet, while defining Topak Ev as a “matrixial tent from Anatolia”,9 studies have also speculated as to whether this structure should be seen as a “home or a prison”.10 The origins of this reiterated interpretation seem to lie, in part, in the initial commentary made by the ethnologist Bernard

Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev  75 Dupaigne, who suggested that it was customary for nomadic Turkmen women, upon marriage, to build a round tent for their new family that would provide them with housing, separating them from their father’s family.11 It has commonly been assumed that this tent signalled the gender of its inhabitants as distinct, in that the black tent would have been understood to have housed only men. Following Dupaigne’s insights and other assertive art historical readings, Yalter’s own statements also, over time, positioned Topak Ev as “a world unto itself, a cosmos in miniature… Protected from the real world—where men no longer allow her to go—[the woman] is hidden in this small-scale world, simulacra, and prison”.12 I would argue, however, that some aspects of Topak Ev that have previously garnered scant attention reveal the artist’s acknowledgment of a diverse social system in this nomadic community wherein conventional gender roles may not exist. For viewers who enter the immersive, sensory environment of the tent, a small painted sheepskin that hangs in the middle of the tent provides one such indication. It features the words of the anthropologist Jean Cuisenier, handwritten by the artist: “the Bektik of the steppe say that the round tent is ‘a house for women’”.13 Above this text, there is a list of words written in French, including fecundité, unique, and douceur, which offers an affirmative vision of Topak Ev as a space that asserts female agency. Indeed, in her very first interviews on Topak Ev, Yalter clearly portrays the gendered context of the nomadic woman quite differently than as a place of confinement. The artist notes that, In this massive tent called Topak there is a reason for everything as every element of the tent stands for something. For example, in contrast to the black tents of patriarchal tribes, Topak is a woman’s sphere. Its roof has a large circular opening. Through there it receives light, which illuminates the woman’s space. The pleats of the rugs and around the tent, just like a woman’s hair, are for decoration, an element of beauty. Whereas the fringes symbolize fertility. They transmit the generosity of the sky and God to those who live in the Topak.14 These observations are consistent with those of Cuisenier, who reported similar findings in his comprehensive research on Anatolian nomads. In his analysis, the anthropologist demonstrates that the round tents are made and inhabited by all members of the nomadic community. Turkmen nomads view Topak Ev as a “feminine” space, but only when compared to the “masculine” black tent, which once belonged to their chief and warriors.15 Referring also to cultural historian Jacob L. Burckhardt’s study of the nomads of the same region, Cuisenier observes that the round tents are used as “the exclusive habitation of the ladies” only in “families who possess large property”.16 The author indicates that this type of gender-based allocation of the tents is unlikely to be seen in the crowded Bektik tribes that Yalter visited, which often consist of several families. Cuisenier finally concurs that all Bektik families build such round tents, although “different from each other by size, complexity, layout [and function], [they are] similar [as] they shelter [both] men and women”.17 While this assertion clearly disturbs the assumptions underlying how gender segregation and roles were interpreted in many readings of Topak Ev, it also indicates the existence of a contemporary “world” where an inherently fluid spatial taxonomy bypasses gender stratification. The fact that this unconventional ethos pertains to a tribal community located at the edge of Europe complicates presumed cultural hierarchies based on geographic distinctions.

76  Ceren Özpınar Considering the Parisian cultural context in which Yalter developed Topak Ev, it is understandable why these findings failed to align with the ideological frameworks that underlay its critical reception, and why, in subsequent iterations, the work continued to be conceived in terms of the art historical trope of the repressed, nomadic “tribal” woman. Indeed, Yalter breathed the air of the feminist revolution in Paris between 1967 and 1970, likely exposed to the debates regarding the social reproduction of inequalities that affect women in careers and at home among feminist theorists such as Antoinette Fouque, Monique Wittig, and Christine Delphy.18 It is also very likely that Yalter read the work of Germaine Greer, Monique Wittig, Kate Millet, and Betty Friedan, who wrote some of the key radical feminist texts of the time,19 many of which made sweeping statements about how female subjectivity is oppressed by patriarchy and particularly by its smallest unit, the family. As Kate Millett argues in Sexual Politics, Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole. Mediating between the individual and the social structure, the family effects control and conformity where political and other authorities are insufficient. As the fundamental instrument and the foundation unit of patriarchal society the family and its roles are prototypical. 20 Despite the fact that a growing body of anthropological literature, including Claude Levi-Strauss’s Anthropologie Structurale (1958/1974) and Race et Histoire (1959), introduced cutting-edge research destabilising previous theories that reinforced cultural and social hierarchies supported by colonialism and imperialism, this version of mainstream feminism failed to acknowledge the diverse ways of living and forming communities that have implications for how one might understand gender. Moreover, it also assumed that the lives of all women who were placed in any kind of social arrangement structured comparably to the institution of the heteronormative family would be disproportionately affected by power. Yet, as Chandra Talpade-Mohanty has argued, the “production of the ‘Third World Woman’ as a singular monolithic subject’ is based on mainstream white feminisms” acceptance of the experience of White women as a norm for all women. 21 In a recent study, Alison Phipps discusses the same issue from a contemporary standpoint and also asserts that this movement: makes claims about “women’s victimhood” based on the experiences of bourgeois white women. … the family is often defined as the primary site of women’s oppression. But Black families and other families of colour can also be havens against capitalist and colonial cultures, and sites of alternative modes of social reproduction. … constructions of other women of colour, for instance that of the “brown” (and usually Muslim) woman, … is always already wounded but very rarely allowed to speak. She is often desexualised, and seen as sexually oppressed. 22 These studies distinctly elucidate the “absence of the acknowledgement of ‘difference’ in feminist understandings”, 23 within the dominant discourses in which Topak Ev’s initial reception was steeped. Understandably, the way that some mainstream feminist texts characterised the institution of family and the notion of home, and

Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev  77 woman’s role within them, aligned very well with the critical commentary on Topak Ev, which positioned the nomadic “tribal” woman’s gendered subjectivity reductively and unfavourably. Seen from this angle, Yalter’s first statements on the gendered stakes of Topak Ev become more significant. Having personally witnessed diverse gender understandings among nomads, Yalter unequivocally portrays this sphere dedicated to women with affirmation. Allied with the alternative social and cultural possibilities the “tribal” nomadic life implies, the tent articulates a space that is laid claim to by women. The photograph of Yalter sitting in the middle of the tent frame in-the-making of Topak Ev, in which she is clearly presenting her own image as a self-confident woman of colour staring out with an unflinching “oppositional gaze”, 24 leaves no doubt that she conceived of the tent as a space that actively encouraged female agency (Fig. 4.2). This image also gestures towards a critique of mainstream feminist ideas by way of embodying the two women and two “worlds” as one: Yalter herself, a woman artist from a Muslim country independently living in France, and the “tribal” “Third-World” woman, whose being is not defined by imperialist and feminist paradigms and assumptions. This vision of space and subjectivity also resonates with what Adrienne Rich calls “a place on the map”, which she defines to

Figure 4.2  Nil Yalter inside the metal construction of Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt), 1973, metal structure, industrial felt, animal skin, wool, leather, text, mixed media, 98 × 118 in. (249 × 300 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and Arter Collection, Istanbul.

78  Ceren Özpınar be “a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist [she is] created and trying to create”. 25 Linking identity construction to a place and time, Rich underlines the importance of acknowledging different experiences of women from different geographies that help make up their subjectivity. As “relational and outside directed … far beyond genealogical self-narratives”, 26 this subjectivity deeply connects the nomadic subject to notions of community and collective memory. Topak Ev’s quality of eliciting difference in feminist “worlds”, which reinscribes the non-normative gendered subjectivity of the nomad in a way that defies the reductive categorisation of women either as emancipated or enslaved, is in fact grounded in the artist’s journey of coming into feminist consciousness, which was unconventionally formed through her transnational connections, and growing up in Istanbul surrounded by female role models in her family and milieu, before she was engulfed by mainstream White feminist literature. As much as supporting Lugones’s thesis of “worlds”, these associations also evoke Chris J. Cuomo’s definition of interpersonal “flourishing”, a conception of social actualisation that offers individuals the scope to be both valuable members of communities and “unique persons”. 27 By the time Yalter picked up Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in the 1950s, she was already aware of the need to transform the established gender roles and was indisposed to viewing marriage as the main objective in life. When she married her first husband, her objective in doing so was, at least in part, to be able to obtain a French passport and travel the world freely.28 Similarly, a few years later, her rationale for marrying again was to be able to acquire a house which, at the time, was difficult for a single person, let alone a woman.29 Yalter’s feminist inclinations were nourished through her friendships with other women artists, which stretched beyond Istanbul to her days in Paris. The definitive effect of having a mentor such as the artist Aliye Berger (1903–1974), and friends including novelist Sevim Burak (1931–1983) and musician Tülay German (b. 1935), shaped her aesthetic experience and production. What flowed from Berger’s world was her “self-sufficient and autonomous stance” that Yalter has since embraced in her own journey, whereas Burak encouraged the artist to develop more substantial artworks.30 Her long-term friend German, on the other hand, was one of the influential artistic figures who participated in the Marxist struggle in Istanbul in the early 1960s.31 Much as their friendship traversed continents and decades, their feminist and political engagements were generative in the inception of Topak Ev.32 Moreover, Yaşar Kemal, whose novel The Legend of the Thousand Bulls (1971) Yalter pasted in parts around Topak Ev, was also involved in some of these worlds across borders.33 It was the intersection of these relationships that drew the artist towards the radical politics that edged towards Marxism and anti-imperialism, ideologies that were to profoundly condition Topak Ev.34 Having long been concerned with issues of social justice and equality, Yalter became a member of the Communist Party of Turkey (CPT).35 Shut down in 1922 due to rising fears of communism, the CPT was unofficially operating in Turkey at the time. Yet, many individuals from Yalter’s “worlds”, such as German, were either involved with CPT or supported the (Marxist) Workers Party (WP) that was formed in 1961. The agenda of the latter, especially, was of particular importance to CPT partisans as it advocated “linking socialist arguments to the concrete problems of the masses” and therefore received wide support from minority communities like Turkmen nomads and Kurds who lived in the rural areas that aspired to land reform.36

Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev  79

Outside the Tent: Materialising Histories of Violence Yalter thus produced Topak Ev out of an awareness that enfolded the political and intellectual climate of the 1960s with a recognition of the importance of cultural and social difference. In this respect, by creating this authentic reincarnation of the nomadic tent, Yalter also gestured towards the violent history of nomads in Turkey. Mostly erased from collective memory today, their voices and stories are often silenced by master narratives, a theme that underpins this artwork. Furthermore, Topak Ev channels the cognate communities’ experience of oppression and loss as enmeshed in the nomadic past. The Kurdish people also have such a history. For decades, sequentially mobilising ethnic and national politics to eradicate difference within their own realm, the Ottomans and the Turks have inflicted the same form of violence upon both of them. Considering Carol J. Adams’s concept of “absent referent” in this context, which she defines as an indicator of the legacies of invasive settler-colonialism that have become absent in the course of producing goods to serve capital and political power, makes this crossover between histories and experiences more comprehensible.37 By denoting the nomadic “world”, Topak Ev not only communicates the nomads’ threatened and vanishing existence but also embodies an absent referent for the Kurdish. What makes this relationship more palpable are the inscriptions Yalter placed on the outer cover (Fig. 4.3). These excerpts from the work of the Turkish novelist Yaşar Kemal (1925–2015) and the Russian poet Viktor (Velimir) Khlebnikov (1885–1922) situate Topak Ev as a political act.

Figure 4.3  Nil Yalter, Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt) and the artist in the making process with the inscriptions visible around the tent, 1973, metal structure, industrial felt, animal skin, wool, leather, text, mixed media, 98 × 118 in. (249 × 300 cm). Photo credit: Mayotte Magnus Levinska. Image courtesy of the artist and Arter Collection, Istanbul.

80  Ceren Özpınar On the outside of the tent, Yalter wrote one of Khlebnikov’s38 theses from his Proposals (1915–1916), which translates as, “Humanity in the age of air travel cannot place limits on the right of its members to a private, personal space”. 39 When read in the context of the original proposition, this line argues for every individual’s right to have a place in any city, as well as to move any time without any stipulations. The subsequent proposition further elucidates Khlebnikov’s intention, which visualises a radically transnational system, whereby all countries can jointly claim possession of the entire surface of the earth. Born into a family of Mongolian Buddhist nomads, Khlebnikov wrote these lines during the Great War, if not at the outset of the 1917 Revolution. They point to his far-reaching political views on possession and movement more broadly, which determinately envision putting an end to wars and conflicts. When confronted by Khlebnikov’s words in the intimate atmosphere of Topak Ev, viewers are likely compelled to reflect upon the kind of hopes and disappointments that inhabiting a nomadic space and leading such a lifestyle may entail. However, what Khlebnikov promises also points towards alternative political futures that could mitigate the burdens of past and present. It thus precisely corresponds to Topak Ev’s quality as a site that draws diverse “worlds” together, where identifying with communities and gendered structures differently than according to established imperialist orders and mainstream understandings seems to be possible. Also pasted outside is a long passage from Kemal’s novel, The Legend of the Thousand Bulls, which was published in 1971, only a couple of years before Topak Ev was made. Drawing upon his own unmediated account and historical facts, in this novel Kemal depicts the story of Turkmen nomads who resisted violent nationwide operations of sedentarisation. Indeed, in one of her very first interviews about Topak Ev, Yalter asserted that “what [she] wanted to say through Topak Ev, Yaşar Kemal has already offered to his readers”.40 By the time he published this novel, Kemal was hailed as an internationally acclaimed writer and an intellectual deeply concerned with the inequitable conditions under which minorities were forced to live.41 Having witnessed the destructive effects of the national sedentarisation policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and as one of the leaders of the WP, he was a fierce critic of the government.42 But Kemal’s encounter with nomads went back to his childhood, during which he lived in a semi-nomadic village with his family of Kurdish descent.43 Indeed, I argue that taking into account the convergence of Kemal’s ethnic Kurdish ancestry and his novel’s subject in concert with Yalter’s engagement with his writing places Topak Ev at the intersection of unsettling histories faced by nomads as well as Kurdish communities. This thread, subtly woven into the complex narrative of Topak Ev, allows me to relocate the political underpinnings of the work in the 1960s, a much earlier timespan than previous studies have considered.44 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s in France, while struggles for decolonisation were being waged around the world, scholars began to address the problematic ways that colonialism had been legitimised and historicised. Two artists in Yalter’s Parisian “world”, who were prominently investigating these relationships, Christian Boltanski (b. 1944) and Sarkis Zabunyan (b. 1938), organised a show together at ARC in 1970. Boltanski’s work in this period paid special attention to individual histories and challenged the art establishment, later leading to a framework within which he targeted master narratives and confronted inherited traumas caused by the Holocaust.45 Similarly, the Istanbul-born Armenian artist Sarkis, a close friend of Yalter’s, was navigating through cultural remnants and collective memories of the

Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev  81 past, while exposing the crimes committed by nations such as Turkey against the Armenian community.46 Topak Ev’s concern with nomads and Kurds engages similar lines of political and historical inquiry, which sought to reawaken memories of historical trauma and conflict, located in critical collective consciousness, which had long been obliterated from the national narrative. Indeed, as Turkmen nomads were being decimated across Turkey as a result of the systematic and extensive efforts of sedentarisation and displacement in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kurdish people were also progressively separated and forcefully migrated.47 Categorised today under the religious and ethnic Alevi minority, Turkmens and Kurds are described as the two communities that have been highly assimilated and stigmatised in Turkey.48 While the long-term, political and cultural oppression and assimilation of Kurds is more widely known today, Turkmen nomads, who served as the border protectors of the Ottomans, were the first to be targeted by the sedentarisation project. Under Ottoman rule, nomadic groups were perceived as a threat to the project of developing a homogeneous national identity and seen as non-conforming with respect to territorial control and bureaucratic power.49 Their migration routes were therefore eliminated, and they were gradually and systematically manipulated into buying land.50 In considering the processes through which modern nations are made, Sankaran Krishna has argued that “the violent unmaking of all alternative forms of community”51 has been universally legitimised. In the construction of modern Turkey, it was communities such as Turkmen nomads and Kurds who were defined “as the number-one threat to Turkish national identity and the state… variously challenging the homogenous conception of modern Turkish identity, [they] were now declared the new enemies”. 52 In light of this history, Yalter’s painstaking reproduction of the tent, replete with references to the practices of the repressed nomadic and Kurdish communities, including a study of a “Kurdish carpet motif” on one of the accompanying panels, entails more than just an attempt to document aspects of their quotidian existence (Fig. 4.4). The dozen panels, which also include reproductions of Dupaigne’s photographs showing nomads performing daily chores, and which explicate discreet details such as kitchen utensils, stages of making and decorating felt, and the process of building a round tent, constitute an integral part of the installation. The lion’s share of the critical literature on Topak Ev has tended to characterise Yalter’s commitment to her subject, as manifest in her attention to detail and her faithful depictions of her intimate encounters with these objects and people, as “intense ethnographic research”.53 While this kind of meticulous assessment aligns with her ensuing commitment to studying the diasporic experience of Kurdish people in France in her later works, including in Rahime, Kurdish Woman from Turkey (1979) (Fig. 4.5), I suggest that her approach to her material reinforces Topak Ev’s position as a site that encapsulates the intertwined “worlds” of translocal communities, which were sustained and reformed through displacement and oppression during a period of intense nation-building struggle. While the overarching questions addressed by Topak Ev engage equality and social justice as a pervasive issue, contemporary critical studies have often taken up the voluntary movement of the artist as an émigré to Paris some years before the making of this work to draw connections between the delineations of nomadic life and Yalter’s alienation as an immigrant in France.54 There is, however, a distinction to be made between the nomad and the migrant, particularly in terms of path, experience, and vision. Noting that “The

82  Ceren Özpınar

Figure 4.4  Nil Yalter, a panel from Topak Ev (Nomad’s Tent or Yurt), 1973, pencil, coloured pencil, and photocopies on cardboard, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Arter Collection, Istanbul.

Figure 4.5  Nil Yalter, Rahime, Kurdish Woman from Turkey (detail), 1979, photographs and drawings, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev  83

Figure 4.5  Continued.

life of the nomad is the intermezzo”, Rosi Braidotti proposes that though the outcome of the migrant’s journey may be uncertain, the end of their path entails a destination. The nomad, on the other hand, travels between places “as a factual necessity”, which, in a way, are always in between-places.55 De facto deterritorialised, the nomad cannot be re-territorialised, an accommodation not necessarily denied to the migrant. In this regard, correlating Yalter’s émigré experience in Paris to that of the nomad may not be as plausible as one might be tempted to assume—the point being, that in drawing attention to specific histories of resistance and conflict, Topak Ev sidesteps the artist’s circumstances in favour of advocating for matters that demanded immediate political change. To conclude, I want to return to how the nomadic subject sees the tent. As suggested by Cuisenier, Turkmen nomads’ perception of the round tent, which in simplest terms is conceived as a temporary dwelling, is complicated in its distinction from a similar structure, the yurt, which, in the discipline of ethnography, is the term commonly used to collectively designate the round tent. Nomads, however, see the tent as a temporary “location, a materially fixed abode, a constructed edifice”, whereas the yurt conveys an “area for rights, a place of reference, a domain ancestrally possessed”. 56 Yet, Yalter entitled Topak Ev as both a tent and a yurt. Considering that she would be aware of the fact that the word yurt means “home” or “homeland” in Turkish, her decision to designate the tent as both would seem to be deliberate. Thus, complicating the distinctions between transience and permanence, between a house and a home, Yalter situates Topak Ev as not only a dwelling, but also as a marker of identity as defined by land and history. Accordingly, far from being confined to representing universal nomadism or immigration, it is clear that the round tent connects Topak Ev to the Anatolian cultural geography as a determinant of its identity and particular place in history. By constituting Topak Ev as a political act of resistance and remembrance, rather than a mere ethnological study, Yalter acts to preserve the memory of the nomadic Turkmen and Kurdish communities. While contingent on the elements she has subtly incorporated into its structure, Topak Ev demands answers for the burdened pasts and presents between “worlds”, the tent’s resonating presence at once undercuts the assumptions that circumscribe feminist agency, subjectivity, and space.

84  Ceren Özpınar

Acknowledgements I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to Nil Yalter for her time and for sharing her memories with me. Many thanks also to my Art and Feminism students at the University of Brighton for our amazing discussions, which helped me rethink some aspects of this chapter. I conducted parts of this research while in my post as The British Academy Newton International Fellow at the University of Sussex between 2015 and 2017.

Notes 1 It is not clear if later displays of Topak Ev were faithful to all of the authentic details featured at l’ARC. Years later, when it was shown for the first time in Istanbul at santralistanbul’s Modern and Beyond, 1950–2000 exhibition in 2007, which also marks my first physical encounter with the work, alimentary elements were missing. Neither did the 2016 version of Topak Ev include them, which was reconstructed for Yalter’s retrospective at Frac Lorraine in Metz, France. Neither was the oculus included in later versions. 2 Yonca Köksal, “Coercion and Mediation: Centralization and Sedentarization of Tribes in the Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 42 no. 3 (2006): 477. 3 Yonca Köksal, ibid.; and Jean Cusenier, “Une Tente Turque D’Anatolie Centrale,” L’Homme Vol. 10 no. 2 (1970): 66. 4 María Lugones, “Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia, Vol. 2 no. 2 (Summer, 1987): 10. 5 Silvia Bottinelli, “The Discourse of Modern Nomadism: The Tent in Italian Art and Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s,” Art Journal, Vol. 74 no. 2 (2015): 63. 6 Teresa Kittler, “Living Differently, Seeing Differently: Carla Accardi’s Temporary Structures (1965–1972),” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 40 no. 1 (2017): 93. 7 Ahu Antmen, “Cinsiyetli Kültür, Cinsiyetli Sanat: 1970’lerden 1980’lere Türkiye’de Toplumsal Cinsiyet ve Kadın Sanatçılar,” Toplum ve Bilim, Vol. 125 (2012): 83–84; and Esra Yıldız, “Toplumsal Cinsiyet Bağlamında 1970’lerden 2000’lere Türkiye Çağdaş Sanatında Kadın Sanatçılar” (PhD diss., Istanbul University, 2012), 162 and 183. 8 Catherine Gonnard and Élisabeth Lebovici, Femmes Artistes / Artistes Femmes: Paris, de 1880 à Nos Jours (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2007), 332–333. 9 To an extent, Aliaga also interprets Topak Ev from a matrilinear angle. Juan Vicente Aliaga, “Center of Gravity: Feminism and Gender Perspective in Nil Yalter’s Work from the 1970s and 80s,” in Nil Yalter, ed. Derya Yücel, trans. Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2013), 138. 10 Gonnard and Lebovici, ibid. 11 Bernard Dupaigne cited in Fabienne Dumont, Nil Yalter, trans. Charles Penwarden (Paris: MAC VAL, 2019), 166. 12 Lou Svahn, “Nil Yalter,” New Media Encyclopaedia, accessed 10 April 2019, http://www. newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-art.asp?LG=GBR&ID=9000000000076537&na=& pna=&DOC=bio; Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, “Nil Yalter’s Epic Poetry,” Frieze, 23 April 2019, https://frieze.com/article/nil-yalters-epic-poetry. 13 “…les Bektik de la steppe disent que la tente ronde est ‘une maison de femmes.’” Cuisenier, ibid., 66. 14 Nil Yalter quoted in Zeynep Oral, “Nil Yalter in ‘Topak-Ev’ Sergisi Paris’te Ilgi Gördü,” Milliyet Sanat, Vol. 61 (4 January 1974): 10. Translation and emphasis is mine. 15 Cuisenier, ibid. 16 Jacob L. Burckhardt quoted in ibid., 61. 17 Cuisenier also notes that in other Turkmen tribes, men and women live together but in black tents. Ibid., 68–69. 18 Aliaga, ibid., 135. 19 Fabienne Dumont, Nil Yalter, 177; Derya Yücel, “Nil Yalter,” in Nil Yalter, ed. Derya Yücel, trans. Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2013), 22; and Interview with Yalter, 28 April 2017.

Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev  85 20 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 33. 21 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2, Vol. 12 no. 3 (Spring–Autumn 1984): 333–335. Also see Ceren Özpınar and Mary Kelly, “Introduction: Transnational Feminisms and the Decolonisation of the History of Art,” in Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today, eds. Özpınar and Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–8. 22 Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 62–63, 64, 74–75. 23 Sankaran Krishna as quoted in Swati Parashar, “Feminism and Postcolonialism: (En) gendering Encounters,” Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 19 no. 4 (2016): 371. For an overview of debates on women’s agency in the wider Middle East geography, see Sertaç Sehlikoglu, “Revisited: Muslim Women’s Agency and Feminist Anthropology of the Middle East,” Contemporary Islam, Vol. 12 (2018): 73–92. 24 bell hooks describes the oppositional gaze as “a site of resistance for colonized black people globally” that asserts agency and “politicizes ‘looking’ relations”. See hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation, ed. Marc Furstenau (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 116–117. 25 Adrienne Rich, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” (1984) in Blood, Bread, and Poetry – Selected Prose 1979–1985 (Virago Press, London 1987), 212. 26 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012), 216–217. 27 Chris J. Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 98. 28 Personal interview, 2017. 29 Ibid.; and Tülay German, Düşmemiş Bir Uçağın Karakutusu (Istanbul: Çınar, 2001). 30 Yasemin Özcan Kaya and Dilek Winchester, “Men’s Year Dog’s Year: Interview with Nil Yalter,” in Unjust Provocation, ed. Ayşegül Sönmez, trans. Liz Amado (Istanbul: Alef, 2009), 254–255; Yücel, ibid., 14; Personal interview, 2017. 31 Tülay German, “Önsöz,” in Hıfzı Topuz, Paris ’68: Bir Devrim Denemesi (Istanbul: Agora, 2008), viii–ix; Sinan Gündoğar, Muhalif Müzik: Halk Şiirindeki Protesto Geleneğinden Günümüz Politik Şarkılarına (Istanbul: Devin, 2005). 32 Özcan Kaya and Winchester, ibid. 33 Personal interview, 2017. 34 Ismet Giritli, “Turkey since the 1965 Elections,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 23 no. 3 (1969): 353–354. 35 Unfortunately, the artist cannot remember the exact date of this involvement. Yet, it is plausible to locate it in the early 1960s. Dumont, Nil Yalter, 165. See also “Nil Yalter Book Launch and Artist Talk with Vasıf Kortun,” accessed 10 March 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImGMyHgj8yU. 36 Ahmet Samim, “The Tragedy of the Turkish Left,” New Left Review, Vol. 1 no. 126 (March–April 1981): 67–70. 37 Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York and London: Continuum, 1990/2010), 66–67. 38 A very influential figure in the Russian avant-garde, in Turkey Khlebnikov influenced not only Kemal, but also the revolutionary poet Nazım Hikmet (1902–1963). Insights that Yalter received from Hikmet’s poetry have had an overarching impact on her practice. The title of Yalter’s 2019 retrospective in Museum Ludwig and of her ongoing poster series (1974–), “Exile is a hard job” is a verse by Hikmet. 39 The text in French inscribed to Topak Ev is “L’humanité volante ne limite pas ses droits de propriété à une place particulière.” For the English version, see Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘Proposals’, in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov: Volume I – Letters and Theoretical Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 359. 40 Nil Yalter quoted in Zeynep Oral, “Nil Yalter in ‘Topak-Ev’ Sergisi Paris’te Ilgi Gördü,” Milliyet Sanat 61 (4 January 1974): 10. Translation is mine. 41 “Yaşar Kemal (1925–2015)”, Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 18 no. 3 (2015): 225–230; Barry Tharaud, “Yaşar Kemal, Son of Homer,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language,

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Vol. 54 no. 4 (2012): 564; Dumont also touches upon the coincidence in that Yalter’s practice parallels Kemal’s novels that makes a Marxist examination of possible alternative societies and systems of justice. See Dumont, “Nil Yalter’s Nomads: From the Bektiks of the Anatolian Steppe to the Direct Orient Express,” Le Journal de la Verrière, Vol. 9 (2015): 9–13. 42 Barry Tharaud, Yaşar Kemal on His Life and Art (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 103; and Esra Mirze Santesso, “Violence and Postcoloniality in Yaşar Kemal’s Memed, My Hawk,” Postcolonial Text, Vol. 7 no. 1 (2012): 14. 43 Barry Tharaud, ibid., 3–4 and 26. 44 Most studies locate this moment in the early 1970s during the Turkish coup when three young communist students were executed. Dumont, Nil Yalter, 162–165. Eda Berkmen, ibid., 37–38. Derya Yücel, “Nil Yalter,” 18–23. 45 Rebecca DeRoo, “Christian Boltanski’s Memory Images: Remaking French Museums in the Aftermath of ’68,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 27 no. 2 (2004): 221–222; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Mourning or Melancholia: Christian Boltanski’s ‘Missing House,’” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 21 no. 2 (1998): 3–20. 46 Özpınar, “Playing Out the ‘Differences’ in ‘Turkish’ Art Historical Narratives,” in Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World, ed. Martha Langford (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 45–50. 47 Nadje Al-Ali and Latif Tas, “Dialectics of Struggle: Challenges to The Kurdish Women’s Movement,” LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series 22, (2018); Övül Durmusoğlu, “Who is Revolutionary?,” in Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance (Nottingham: Nottingham Contemporary), 1–8; and Özpınar, “Playing Out the ‘Differences,’” 50–54. 48 Ömer Taşpınar, Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam in Turkey: Kemalist Identity in Transition (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 8. Minority Rights Group International’s 2016 report also shows that Turkmens are still one of the minorities that under high risk of displacement, abuse, and violence. See http://minorityrights.org/ wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MRG-SWM-2016.pdf. 49 Serhat Bozkurt, “The Kurds and Settlement Policies from the Late Ottoman Empire to Early Republican Turkey: Continuities and Discontinuities (1916–34),” Iranian Studies, Vol. 47 no. 5 (2014): 824. 50 Köksal, ibid., 478. 51 Sankaran Krishna as quoted in Parashar, ibid., 373. 52 Sedef Arat-Koç, “Turkish Transnationalism(s) in an Age of Capitalist Globalization and Empire: ‘White Turk’ Discourse, the New Geopolitics, and Implications for Feminist Transnationalism,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol. 3 no. 1 (Winter 2007): 39–40 and 42–43. 53 Gönül Gültekin, “Türk Kavramsal Sanatçılarının Çevre Yaratma Sorununa Yaklaşımları,” Türkiye’de Sanat 14, (1994): 58; and Esther Ferrer, “Frontier between Art and Reality,” in Lapiz International Art Magazine, Vol. 60 (1989): 32. 54 Ahu Antmen, Kimlikli Bedenler: Sanat, Kimlik, Cinsiyet (Istanbul: Sel, 2013), 107–108: Eda Berkmen, “Off The Record,” in Nil Yalter: Off The Record, ed. Süreyya Evren (Istanbul: Arter, 2016), 39–40; Fulya Erdemci, “Breaking the Spell, Re-routing,” in Modern and Beyond: 1950-2000, trans. Liz Amado (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2008), 270; and Dumont, Nil Yalter, 172–174. 55 Braidotti, ibid., 380. 56 Cuisenier, ibid.

Part 2

Mediating

5

Creation Stories Australian Arts Feminism Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore

Introduction In Australia, public events such as academic seminars, political rallies, and art exhibitions regularly commence with a formal acknowledgement of the traditional owners of the land upon which they take place. Starting with a “welcome to country” or “acknowledgement of country” is a simple reminder that solidarity and the pursuit of justice in Australia—indeed, the very possibility of activism, including feminist actions—are founded upon the usurpation of Aboriginal sovereignty. This acknowledgement reminds us that liberal feminist notions of “women’s rights” are inextricably linked to privilege, for we live and work in a context where self-determination for the traditional custodians of this land is continually undermined, and where there are those who are marked as less than qualified for citizenship. This localised practice reminds us that long before the term “intersectionality” was coined, earlier generations of feminist artists framed their experiences in terms not only of gender but also according to the everyday realities of much of the world’s women, realities permeated by race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, among other factors, even when their work may retroactively appear to essentialise or naturalise women’s relations to labour, the female body, or the land. In this essay, we explore how the complexities of women’s lived experiences are inscribed in works in a range of media that variously evoke the body as a source of female cultural and political power. In doing so, we bring together three feminist artists who have provided important intergenerational and intersectional connections: Ailsa O’Connor’s (1921–1980) arts activism spans twentieth-century engagements from the late 1930s working women’s struggles to “New Left” feminism; Vivienne Binns (b. 1940) linked art and life in the contexts of the so-called 1960s sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and community arts; and Thancoupie (also spelled Thanakupi, baptised as Gloria Fletcher James [1937–2011]), from Napranum (Weipa) in Far North Queensland, connected the customary imagery of her traditional lands (or Country, as it is colloquially termed) to Black Power activism and arts education. These three artists have slipped into archival obscurity and their work is rarely considered side by side. We hope to complicate current discourses by bringing them to the attention of an avowedly more inclusive, anti-essentialist, and intersectional younger generation of readers. O’Connor articulated the potent force of working class and multi-ethnic female bodies in ways that radically feminised the social realist milieu of her early career. Binns horrified art world audiences in 1967 with funky, “cunt-dentata” imagery that sank teeth into the critical art establishment, yet fell short of claiming

90  Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore any essential or universal font of feminine sexual power. Thancoupie lived her “intersectionality” every day and in every way, working between her Country and metropolitan art centres to craft customary “women’s business” that was accessible to youngsters and non-Indigenous audiences through body-based ceramic forms that asserted her cultural authority as a First Nations matriarch. The practices of these artists resonate with, yet owe nothing to, Lucy Lippard’s famously globalising 1976 “shopping list” of feminine aesthetics,1 nor do they connect with academic feminist “essentialist” discussions, though we note how their articulation of “shared differences” throws new light on this hitherto Eurocentric debate. 2 Rather, these diverse practices together underline how relationality may direct our understandings of women’s subjectification and agency within a historical grid of patriarchal capitalist and settler-colonial power relations. Our focus on the relationality of feminist artistic practices in Australia challenges the less than rigorous accusations of gendered “essentialism” that could be levelled at works such as those examined in this chapter. While the Euro-American “essentialist debate” became hegemonic in academic feminist circles in Australia from the later 1970s, 3 we argue that in fact Australian artworks from this earlier period conceived new, feminist conceptualisations of bodies from localised viewpoints—using the decolonising lenses of race, as well as cultural difference, class, and sexuality. To clarify, we use “relationality” to emphasise the embeddedness of feminist artistic practices in relations among living bodies, and to foreground that these practices are partly constituted by these very relations. In particular, we find the term useful to evoke how Indigenous and settler women artists in Australia engaged with entangled forms of discrimination within their particular contexts long before the emergence of the term “intersectionality.”

Reviewing “1970s Feminism” Australian feminism has surfed successive waves for well over a century, and with each surge, our herstorical understanding of the previous wave lets drift some of its political and cultural complexities. Feminism has a relatively weak archival net in Australia, and as subsequent tides wash sand in our collective ears, dissonant memories are wiped, for “wave-ism” (and its decadist sub-set) is a form of nostalgic historiography that appeals to a generalised psychological outlook or social pathology. This hinders the examination of ideological differences within feminism, and important alliances and frictions in women’s liberation as a social movement. It is time to problematise these temporal stereotypes and broaden our herstorical markers, which narrowly locate the emergence of Australian arts feminism in the Women’s Art Movements (WAMs) that organised in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide between 1973 and 1977. While their membership reflected the young, White, predominantly middle-class origins of the typical art school and university student of the period,4 it would be wrong to assume WAM ignorance of White middle-class privilege, or claim their narrow focus was on smashing the art world glass ceiling. A broader view sees that sporadic, cross-cultural exchange between White and Indigenous women artists flowed both ways during this period: Aboriginal artists invited individual non-Indigenous colleagues to teach and work with them at the newly founded art centres that were emerging within the Homelands Movement, 5 and White feminists were learning much from Indigenous artists.6 Many feminists also developed their

Creation Stories 91 arts practice in the marginalised, intersectional spaces of community arts. O’Connor, Binns, Thancoupie, and others broadened the feminist studio to variously include suburban malls and schools, remote outstations, and country town halls. A significant proportion of feminist work from the period affirms the intersectional politics of women’s liberation articulated in Mejane, Camp Inc, Scarlet Woman, Vashti’s Voice, Refractory Girl, and other feminist presses. These connective actions remind us that “1970s feminism” is a weak analytic category. Feminism is beset with as many contradictory priorities as there are sex, race, ability, and class contradictions affecting women’s lives: then, as now, “doing feminism” generates an agonist, historically situated, and coalitional politics. We argue that our selected artists “did feminism” according to their lived, everyday realities, which were as unevenly shaped by gender as by settler-colonial dispossession and racism, class conflict, histories of fascism and Cold War paranoia, and the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s.7

Ailsa O’Connor: The Art of Alliance As a founding member of the Melbourne Women’s Art Forum (WAF) in 1976, Ailsa O’Connor brought a depth of art practice and activist experience to a younger generation largely ignorant of the herstory of Australian art. O’Connor had matured with the international humanism of Käthe Kollwitz, William Gropper, and Philip Evergood, and like other Australian social realists—a key movement within Australian modernism from the 1930s to the 1950s—she admired the German Expressionists and Mexican Realists rather than Soviet-styled socialist realism. She was the only woman artist to participate in the now-celebrated 1942 Anti-Fascist exhibition, and her painting of young working girls “strolling home from factory jobs in Brunswick and Richmond streets where I had observed them” was a prizewinning entry in the 1945 Australia at War exhibition.8 Among O’Connor’s early colleagues were refugees fleeing Hitler’s Europe, and their expressionist work indirectly influenced her own approach to the female figure. She adapted expressionism’s portable, humanist philosophy9 to depict “subjects hitherto unseen: Aborigines, Negroes, Refugees, Air Raids, Army Life”10 as emotionally charged figures of modern displacement. In the 40s and 50s, she was herself largely professionally invisible: as a young woman married to a leading artist (Vic O’Connor), she later recalled that “our men didn’t really see us; we hardly saw ourselves”.11 As she developed her practice, O’Connor feminised Australian social realism through creating visual expressions of women’s everyday experiences—of her children and friends, of migrant and working-class women at work in the home, the factory, or at the market. From the 1970s, when she could afford to travel and practise art full time, she sketched and sculpted women and children in the contexts and conditions of their home regions.12 O’Connor valued traditional modelling in light and shade, and used a casual, sketching technique to sum up situations and convey an intensity of mood. Her expressive contours of women’s bodies extend to a shaping of the collective body politic, with connective figures that are maternal and sisterly rather than workerist. O’Connor visualises women as an embodied source of cultural, social, and political power by modifying the Marxist schema of “typicality”, wherein the individuated figure could indicate economic and social conditions such as the experience of alienation and social fragmentation of life under capitalism. This suffering could be mitigated through the figure’s simultaneous evocation of the progressive “motor”

92  Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore

Figure 5.1  A ilsa O’Connor, Not titled, 1975, lithograph, printed in black ink, from one stone 23 1/2 × 18 in. (59.4 × 46 cm). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia, Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund 1991.

of history: traditionally the transformative power of the proletariat, whose labouring body gathers its energies in productive and communal economic and social processes.13 O’Connor radically modifies this Marxist aesthetic orthodoxy. Her late, untitled lithograph from 1975 (Fig. 5.1) is a composite image. In the foreground, we see two young women—one strives forward as if propelled into our space, her back and head are arched as if to support and counterbalance the weight of the infant that she carries on her back. She looks out at us in her distress, but carries on. The image echoes her many working sketches of Vietnamese refugees, and O’Connor’s image files suggest that these figures were probably drawn from a newspaper cutting.14 The young woman’s anguish is curiously amplified through two shadow figures—an older woman and man—who bend and shuffle out from a sketchily indicated townscape. The generalised setting evokes the historical, expressionist motif of exile that was familiar in O’Connor’s youthful anti-fascist milieu. What historical connections does the artist want us to make here? She reprises remembered figures of dispossession and endurance from the 1930s as an historical backdrop to the plight of these young Vietnamese women at war’s end, to confront the Australian government’s egregious response to the subsequent refugee crisis. Through her compositional connective rhythms, these marginalised bodies also convey the strength inherent in familial and communal relations as an almost subterranean, transhistorical power. This is a far cry from the social realist embodiment of historical transformation in proletarian, muscular labour. Elsewhere, O’Connor sketches women working, shopping, carrying children,

Creation Stories 93 attending meetings, and marching on International Women’s Day.15 Her images of “everywoman” are bearers of historical consciousness; in O’Connor’s Marxist reformulation, they are the progressive “forces of history” through which we can again find our way forward. While “typical”,16 their bodies richly express specific conditions of female experience—shared differences that come together as an historical, translocal feminist consciousness, a feminist subjectivity that emerges through intersectional relation—glimpsed through small, everyday gestures or stolen moments of personal reflection and stillness, as moments of intense, female awareness coming into being. O’Connor aligned her studio practice with political activism. She was among those “de-mobbed” post-war women who, in 1950, founded the broad left platform of the Union of Australian Women (UAW),17 which enjoyed a diverse membership of paid and unpaid women workers. As the UAW’s Adelaide branch Secretary explained, this was “a working-class organisation… We do represent a different point of view. Women from a middle-class background are different from women with a working-class background”.18 O’Connor was Secretary of the Victorian branch from 1950 to 1955, and had also joined the Communist Party in 1944. In 1953–1956, she initiated exchanges of children’s art with her UAW colleague Frances Emery as the Cold War freeze hardened to dangerous levels: children’s art could be a platform for dialogue, to counter Australia’s fixation on communist China and Southeast Asian anti-colonialism, xenophobic anxieties fuelled by ignorance “of the viewpoint and problems of our closest neighbours”.19 Building upon their international feminist contacts and UAW networks, 20 O’Connor and Emery collected artworks by Australian Aboriginal and non-Indigenous children for exhibition in schools and kindergartens, local libraries, community halls, hospitals, and convents alongside comparable work from Asia and the Pacific, to foster “friendship between the youth (and their parents) of the Pacific region… (and) offer creative alternatives to the corrupting influences at work on the minds of children, spreading racist ideas as a preparation for war”. 21 O’Connor’s art of coalitional, female agency refigured Marxist aesthetics to emphasise the contingencies of class, race, and gender. Careful examination of her intersectional activism and talent for artistic alliance upsets later academic criticisms of social realism’s mechanistic “reflection theory” and overprivileging of class relations and, on the other hand, of early feminism’s reductive generalisation of White, middle-class female experience.

Vivienne Binns: The Libidinous Female Body We wish to counter a similar misidentification of Vivienne Binns’s (1940–) “central core” imagery. Within a decade of their first public showing in 1967, such vaginal adventures would be castigated or ignored as “essentialist” in some feminist circles, only to be recuperated as an Australian forerunner of the transnational central core project in others.22 We argue, however, that Binns’s iconic paintings and junk bas-reliefs are quite distinct from the purposive design of US central core work. Unlike much of the central core imagery that developed in the US context, which became associated with a programmatic political agenda, they represent a personal exploration of female sexual pleasure in the white, male-dominated counterculture and artworld of the sixties. As Binns observed, “There was a fair amount of tension about sexual matters at the time, especially

94  Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore for young people growing up. In the arts and literature and amongst those who were concerned for personal and civil freedoms, censorship was a major issue”. 23 Binns’s milieu—a loose clutch of progressive commercial galleries and artist-run spaces—variously engaged these concerns about personal and civil freedoms within neo-dada, pop, and countercultural actions. 24 Despite the liberal rhetoric associated with these alternative art spaces, few women artists were exhibited, and their work, when noticed, suffered at the hands of a narrowly conceived, formalist criticism. As curator Merryn Gates later acutely observed, “There was just no critical pigeonhole for abstract work which asserted female sexuality and addressed repression and censorship”. 25 Vivienne Binns: Paintings and constructions, her first solo exhibition at Watters Gallery in 1967, is a case in point. It featured pop-naif paintings on shaped composition board, including Phallic Monument and Sacred Bosom Tree, the toothy Vag Dens (Fig. 5.2), and the motorised, mixed-media Suggon, whose central vanishing point was a netted mesh bag that pulsated lazily in the middle of a high-gloss, geometric colour field.26 Having no existing feminist aesthetic vocabulary to draw

Figure 5.2  Vivienne Binns, Vag Dens, 1966, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on composition board, 48 × 36 × 1 in. (122 [h] × 91.5 [w] × 2.5 [d] cm). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.

Creation Stories 95 upon, Binns was not consciously laying down a critical feminist gauntlet. As she later recalled of Vag Dens: I struggled with this one. I’d got the actual cunt there and a few other things that had happened spontaneously but was stopped. There was an image that kept recurring and I rejected it because it seemed a bit too fierce, a bit too crude or something and I kept pushing it aside. In the end I did it and it was to put teeth on the cunt. Once I’d done it, it was right. I was happy. It was totally spontaneous, a direct self-experience.27 The Sydney critics did not know what to make of a woman artist giving her vulva a will of its own, realising itself quite literally as a pleasurably vibrating subject rather than object, through displacing the colloquial moniker “dickhead” with the femalecentric “cunt-face”. These self-portraits did not just traverse the borders between high art and bogan (redneck) Aussie culture, for critics raised on a diet of pop art boobs and butts had no problem appraising straightforward pop-porno, such as mediatised images of women naked or busty in scanty bikinis, when held at a comfortably voyeuristic distance. Hung at eye level, the works’ assertive scale meant that Binns’s beavers literally came too close. Leading newspaper critic Elwyn Lynn pathologised Vag Dens’ cheerful sexuality by naming the style “Analytic Pubism”, as “its ambiguity affronts masculinity by its challenge, makes females feel inadequate, but would excite any marine biologist”.28 Other critics followed suit: “Have a double brandy, grit your teeth and see it”, wrote Rodney Milgate; “[This is] not for the family man or young mothers”, responded Helen Sweeney; getting all that “sickness and sex” off her chest was all well and good, elaborated John Henshaw; we just hope all that embarrassing self-exposure will “leave Miss Binns wholly well adjusted”, concluded Wallace Thornton. Binns’s messy installation exceeded pop art and junk sculpture; it was considered abject waste, as reflected in the critics’ choice of words: “devious movement”, “flood”, “messy”, “morass”, an “avalanche” of “tormented, damaged forms”. 29 Binns’s unbounded wetness was unrepresentable in the aesthetic terms then available: while sexual desire, dreams, and neuroses have been vital wellsprings for modern art, in the misogynist calibrations of 1960s criticism, such unconventional female sexual expression could only signify an embarrassing hysteria. Binns’s approach underlines the irreverent wit of early Australian feminist art. The relative strength of socialist and anarchist tendencies within non-Indigenous Australian arts feminism simply did not lend itself to monumental or elemental imagery. Even a nowiconic feminist “centrefold” is delivered with a cocked eyebrow: Frances (Budden) Phoenix’s (1950–2017) Queen of Spades (1975), a delicately handcrafted doily vulva (complete with zipper) also known as Kunda.30 Phoenix, like Binns, was critical of goddess-affirmation in US arts feminism. Together with fellow WAM member Marie McMahon and other international volunteers, Phoenix toiled long and hard on Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the Santa Monica workshop, and witnessed first-hand what she regarded as exploitative working conditions and autocratic leadership. The libertarian politics of these Australian artists sat uneasily with what they saw to be art world careerism, monumentalism, and irritating goddess worship. In a surreptitious and witty gesture of refusal of that feminist culture, Phoenix embroidered in blood-red the anarcho-feminist slogan “no goddesses/no mistresses” on a white cotton, crochet-edged doily, and slipped it under Ethel Smyth’s Dinner Party place

96  Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore setting.31 When Chicago discovered this dissenting Antipodean voice within Global Sisterhood, the work was removed and the Australians were sent packing. Binns’s Suggon and Vag Dens look innocuous today, yet for many years they enjoyed subcultural cult status as pioneering cunt imagery, hidden deep in the basement storerooms of Australia’s National Gallery. Then, as now, they exude the exuberant, carnivalesque pleasures32 of sexual liberation. Vag Dens’s toothy contours host bulbous secretions that dwarf a small school of bravely swimming sperm in a blissful exchange of energy that connects the sexual self and world. Yet this is a very personal assertion of vulval power. It points away from the monumental regularity of Miriam Schapiro’s hard-edge mistresspiece Big Ox (1967), or the systemic patterning of Judy Chicago’s Hoods (1965), or Pasadena Lifesavers (1970), and even further from the more studious and programmatic feminism of Chicago’s Dinner Party tableware (1974–1979). While Binns’s approach does share with US central core imagery, the affirmation of the female body as a source of creativity and power, Vag Dens is mutable rather than monumental; the wit of the work lies in its morphing of forms, one into another (eye-teeth, cunt-face, hair-brain), acting out a cuntish grotesquery in line with a Rabelaisian, anatomical sense of the word, rather than enfolding a more symbolic or diagrammatic subtext. Times change, and the fear of essentialism (born of reactions to the exclusive nature of some feminisms) has largely abated. Artists now embrace bodies as rich, complex, and irrepressible sources of insight—including that highly charged and contested site, the cunt. Such exploration, which also entails the role of the cunt in feminist organising and thought, nonetheless encompasses the knowledge that vulvas and vaginas are not a prerequisite for womanhood.33

Thancoupie: Asserting Women’s Cultural Authority Feminist concerns over biological essentialism also faltered in the face of Aboriginal concepts of female body power associated with Country, ancestral creator beings, and related cosmological forces. The Thanaquith ceramic artist Thancoupie felt no qualms when building abstracted, female sculptural forms in clay to evoke ontological relations between self, other, and earth (Fig. 5.3), which she variously incised and glazed with traditional images taught to her through sand painting on the beach as a child. Her sweeping lines track the journeys of creator figures developed into a symbolic circle motif: (T)he main theme in pots and murals is the circle. All Aboriginals have used the circle over thousands of years. The circle, to me, is the tribes of Napperdanum all together, the lands all connected. It is also love, fire and warmth, and the earth. And it is also woman and mother.34 Thancoupie rendered teachings from the Dreaming in ceramic forms that complicate the impulse among local White feminists to dismiss the “earth mother” essentialism and goddess affirmations of US feminism. At the same time, Thancoupie’s long-standing practice sidesteps feminist ideological battles that serve to contextualise Binns’s work, while also flying in the face of the “waveist” popular history of Australian Aboriginal art: a history that is masculine in tenor and heroic in ambition, reflecting as it does contemporary art world prejudices and aspirations. Australian art historian

Creation Stories 97

Figure 5.3  T hancoupie, hand-built, gas-fired, carved pots and stoneware with oxide decoration, reduced, with an ash glaze; Trinity Bay, Queensland, Australia, 1984. Courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum.

Una Rey observes how the “Indigenous art revolution” is still commonly considered to have emerged at the remote, Western Desert community of Papunya in 1971, when male elders initiated acrylic painting for an outside audience, encouraged by the local White schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon—a story of frontier arts brokerage that has fed the swell and pride of “waveist” historiography. In privileging men’s “dot” painting on canvas, this story has helped to occlude significant practices in other media by women artists from the period, such as Thancoupie.35 Rey notes how more critical commentators have granted considerably more agency to the artists’ lives before and after Bardon’s 18-month tenure, and adds how these male-centred foundation stories of Western Desert art have been supplemented by looser and less heroic accounts, such as the formative experience of Ernabella Arts, (now Pukatja) established in 1948 by and for Anangu women in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands in the remote northwest of South Australia. Australia’s first women-only art centre produced batik, pottery, pokerwork, and gouache drawings for the tourist market for decades, and remains a stellar example of cultural sustainability. Historical revision also highlights how, in the mid-1970s, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and her countrywomen founded a sister organisation, the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, at the remote Utopia community in the Northern Territory. The group was established to assert cultural identity,

98  Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore economic independence, and to demonstrate the capacity for art to evidence connection to Country, helping the Anmatyerre and Alyawarr peoples to gain freehold title to Utopia under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Utopia Batik helped to support the movement away from centralised communities of station homesteads to smaller, scattered communities on traditional lands. Batik is a portable medium, and the artists could use whatever was at hand for heating the wax (old saucepans, frying pans, even old hub-caps), applying wax with cheap or handmade brushes (later cantings), and boiling the wax out with flour drums on an open fire.36 The women associated with the batik camps used their rich store of traditional visual symbolism, derived from their awely or ceremonial performance, which is practised “to hold and look after their country, promote feelings of happiness, health and well-being in the community. They sing to ensure that bush plants continue to grow in abundance, bush animals proliferate, and to make babies healthy and fat”.37 As Kathleen Petyarre explained in 1988, “That’s women’s business, that awely—men have their own business, atywerreng or sacred objects. They might paint these things themselves—they’ve got their own business. Us women have our own separate ceremonies”.38 Art plays an important part in “women’s business” and as such helps maintain family, community, culture, and Country. Melbourne-based Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara artist Paola Balla explains First Nations feminism thus: I don’t identify with feminism as a white, liberal practice. But I am absolutely a black, feminist woman… I’m trying to be matriarchal, I’m trying to become a matriarch, I’m not one yet and I hope to be one day. My mum is the matriarch of our family right now. … It’s thinking about Aboriginal women’s authority, and Aboriginal women’s knowledge—a matriarchy that has been on this country for over 60,000 years, right? We had our own power. We were sovereign, strong, with our defined and separate roles to men. All of those things were attacked by Christianity, they were attacked by patriarchy, and the colony itself. The colony decided to identify only straight men, males, as the appointed leaders and spokespeople, and pushed Aboriginal women to the back. But Aboriginal women have always been at the forefront of all of the efforts in this country, (for) our rights, for our sovereignty, well-being, nurturing.39 Like Balla, Arrernte activist Celeste Liddle40 affirms the need for a distinctly Aboriginal feminist politic that acknowledges colonial dispossession, whilst being mindful of oppressive practices towards Aboriginal women within “black patriarchy”. These include the generalised presumption that the separate and set roles of men and women had equal importance in communities, along with the way some Aboriginal communities assume that oppressive practices (like beauty pageants) are empowering “because they’re Indigenous initiatives”.41 Despite their differences, Balla’s and Liddle’s Aboriginal feminisms prioritise women’s cultural authority to reconnect, maintain, and grow customary law and cultural knowledge in the face of historical genocide. Thancoupie was born at the Presbyterian Napranum (Napperanum) mission (established in 1879), where she and her siblings learnt domestic arts and crafts through the dormitory system. She also learnt from the women in her immediate family—her mother Ida was a gifted weaver, and Thancoupie and her sisters Joyce and Mildred

Creation Stories 99 helped her make traditional objects (feather flowers, seed and shell necklaces, grass skirts, woven bags, and later painting on stringybark) for use at funerals or other customary ceremonies, and for sale through the mission office.42 In 1955, bauxite was discovered at Weipa and the government leased Indigenous land to mining interests. The mine transformed Weipa life: the local mission inhabitants (themselves from many clans and language groups) were shunted from their stringybark and corrugated iron beach homes to prefabricated fibro housing in the present township, close to the encroaching red dust of the mine.43 Like other mining sites, a separate township was built for non-Indigenous mine employees some 15 km away, bringing a large and fluctuating population of single White men, alcohol, and gambling. The mission church helped Thancoupie survive personal and community tragedies,44 and she developed a belief system that comprised a pragmatic and sympathetic relation between church and Indigenous law.45 Thancoupie first exhibited her paintings on stringybark in 1968, alongside pioneering Goobalathaldin artist Dick Roughsey. In 1970, she travelled south to East Sydney Technical College, where Vivienne Binns had also trained. She moved to the ceramics studio and, in 1973, became the first Aboriginal to graduate from the school. Ceramics at that time swung between the lingering imported influence of the Leach/ Hamada aesthetic (thrown stoneware with natural glazes and minimal decoration) and an emerging “Kangaroovian funk”.46 As the art curator Kirsten Fitzpatrick notes, Thancoupie did not engage with this stylistic tug-of-war within the post-war ceramics world, but went her own way: “Trained in the studio ceramic tradition, she developed a unique visual language which was initially applied to thrown vessels, but soon became integrated into distinctive hand-built forms”.47 Thancoupie was drawn to ceramics as clay was earth, Country. In Thanaquith culture, she later explained, clay …was sacred. We only used it for ceremony and each colour had a meaning. Red, black, yellow and white. The men used to keep the clay in a special storehouse and we kids were not allowed to touch it. We used it only for decoration, of our bodies and special spears and woomerahs, not to make things.48 Thancoupie repurposed Western ceramic hand-building techniques to revive and maintain the cosmological value of clay in Thanaquith culture. She saw the material’s cultural power as a suitable ground or body on which to incise non-secret-sacred symbols of ancestor beings whose journeys across land and sea created land forms, land ownership, and custodianship, kinship systems, and other aspects of customary law, as expressed through story and ceremony (men and women’s “business”). Thancoupie compressed those Thanaquith teachings she was permitted to use or depict into abbreviated hybrid figures and patterns that she had learned as a child. She recalled how, My next-door granny-in-law would pick out some coloured ash and draw a turtle—a circle with hands and a head and tail. And then she would colour the turtle by sprinkling sand and ash—yellow, white, black and parts red. I’m sure every time I draw a turtle it is exactly like her turtle”.49 While at art school in Sydney, Thancoupie also joined other radical First Nations activists from the fledgling National Black Theatre and Black Power movements.

100  Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore Long-time friend, fellow potter and writer Jennifer Isaacs, remembers the enthusiastic cross-cultural engagement of their shared household: …the kitchen table groaned under the weight of cups of tea and indigenous cultural meetings. Visitors included Bob Perry, Euphemia, Gerry and Lester Bostock, Steve and Lydia, Paul Coe, Gary Foley, John Newfong and Bob Maza… Thancoupie featured in an early edition of the first glossy Aboriginal magazine Identity, edited by John Newfong, and her own people began to buy her mugs for their tea and murals for their offices and homes.50 A 1974 visit to the Santa Fe Indian Institute furthered Thancoupie’s ideas for revitalising Indigenous cultures, prompting art exchanges in the Torres Strait and Papua New Guinea, Canada, Fiji, and New Zealand. In Mexico (1975), she was bowled over by the round earthenware forms of Mexican and North American Indigenous potters: “Being in Mexico confirmed me in my culture. I saw people who had survived all this modern industry and who were still strong in their culture. …I felt my strength growing within me”.51 Thancoupie regularly returned to Napranum to “gain strength”, learn and obtain permission to develop imagery through which to express her ceremonial life. She conveyed her essential relation to Country through hand-built egg shapes (fertility), spherical vessels (earth, the cycle of life), 52 and ancestral motifs from Thanaquith cosmology; but to view these as essentialist imagery (or even as a pan-Aboriginal, “strategic essentialism”)53 misidentifies her creolised aesthetic language. Consider instead how the Bama (Apalech) academic Tyson Yunkaporta describes Aboriginal English, which works through “stories, imagery and yarns … with meaning being made in the meandering paths between the words, not the isolated word themselves”. 54 Thancoupie’s pots and early Creation ceramic tile murals, made from a coarse stoneware body incorporating 50% raku clay, are incised with “short-hand” symbols derived from Napperanum creation stories to evoke links between the physical, material, and spiritual worlds. They suggest complex stories of land formation, kinship, and land care.55 Her first Creation mural forms two sections: the first showing the sun, moon, and stars, day and night, and the birth of the Napperanum peoples and their country. This story is associated with the Gemini constellation, shown as twin boys rising into the sky. The second section is dominated by the figure of Chara, the fire man with his feathers putting out the flames, and Cheewaree, the third major creation story of the Napperanum people. These central forms are backgrounded with textured tiles, “represent(ing) sky, day, night, earth, air, fire and water”.56 We cannot apprehend the secret-sacred, insider knowledge that Thancoupie expresses in what is commonly called “outside” imagery. When describing the work, she instead emphasises the importance of community relations and protocols observed in the making: My big mum, Inga, and my aunt Macthouone told the main stories that helped me to put all the others together. Every legend belongs to a tribal land and because all the lands were connected I started to see all the stories are connected too. Eventually I saw they formed a circle and now… I have each of the stories in its place.57 To Yunkaporta, Aboriginal English marks a bridge between the disclosed and undisclosed, as a lived praxis. In contrast to essentialism, creolisation implies a shifting

Creation Stories 101 play of cultural opacity, and Thancoupie’s ceramic works draw attention to their own mysteries, becoming opaque to outside observers of First Nations philosophy and spirituality. Like the encoded process and depiction of awely or women’s ceremonial business in Utopia batik work, Thancoupie’s forms and motifs indicate Country, law, and kinship, yet require a poetic understanding of things that remain within themselves. Thancoupie is generous in her use of the female body as a symbol that outsiders can readily identify, yet in refusing cultural transparency, her feminist subjectivity is grounded in place, language, and culture to which we have no direct access. Her works instead ask us “to imagine (our) interaction and shape it at the same time: to dream and to act”, as the Martinique poet Édouard Glissant wrote of such encounters. 58 The material nature of these relations can only be divined or momentarily grasped, and in this way, the works unsettle the discursive lines of academic connection and contestation that continue to ground feminist debates on essentialism. Indeed, they suggest that it is time to localise the terms and forms of this historical debate. Thancoupie asserted her “matriarchal” authority through situated and dynamic processes of community yarning and making. Like O’Connor and Binns’s community-based ventures, 59 we need to think of her work alongside the cross-cultural programmes for children that she ran from her studio in Far North Queensland, based on the Aboriginal idea that art is always central to life, law, ceremony, and the continuity of culture. As an Indigenous feminist matriarch, this meant teaching art alongside saltwater hunting and gathering, cooking the bush tucker, instructing the therapeutic and ceremonial nature of fire, tracking, learning how to find bush medicines, and exploring traditional healing techniques.60

Conclusion It is a truism to say that Australian women live their intersectionality every day, everywhere. Multidisciplinary artist and writer S.J. Norman, of Wiradjuri and European heritage, underscored this practical, intersectional politic when she observed at a recent Adelaide forum that, Feminist is a term that I struggle with… in the same way I struggle with Queer, with trans, with non-binary, and, in a different but intersecting way, with Aboriginal… all of these words …contain multitudes and they contain deep conflict, and in all cases it’s a conflict that pervades my life and my body.61 We have associated the creative force of Australian feminism with a relational understanding of patriarchal-colonial powers and structures. Then, as now, identity categories are never discrete: a woman is never simply working class, for example. We are also gendered, racialised, marked, or assumed as having a sexuality, or specific dis/ abilities. Liddle notes how her responses to issues of gender are very much informed by my experience of race, and vice versa. My experience of structural forms of oppression was heightened due to these intersecting forms of oppression, and are particularly acute due to being of a working class background. Therefore, when it comes to Aboriginal feminism, I very much see our questions and tactics occupying the more ‘radical’ end of the feminist spectrum.62

102  Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore The feminisms of O’Connor, Binns, and Thancoupie are similarly situated, which we highlighted through unpicking these artists’ seemingly essentialist use of feminist embodiment: O’Connor’s “everywoman” figures and her valorisation of the international child artist; Binns’s material expression of polymorphous sexual pleasures; Thancoupie’s vessel forms and recurrent motif of the circle as life-giver, fire, mother, and earth. Feminism helps us understand how categories of subjectification have their own specific histories and entanglements within a grid of power relations, legislation and governance, and ways of classifying and making sense of the world. It allows multiple lenses through which to critique institutional difference and power. What is important, though, is that this critique takes place. As liberalism is a central ideology underpinning patriarchal and neocolonial power relations today, we note how artists have created works that avoid rather than reproduce liberal subjectivities. Artists craft, paint, and organise social “differences within differences”, thinking a number of differences at once, as S.J. Norman so ably describes herself. Feminist artists operate within an agonist space of embodied experience, helping us understand the historical, customary, political, and economic circumstances that give rise to such categories.

Notes 1 Lucy R. Lippard, From the Centre: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, (New York: Dutton, 1976). 2 See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, Boundary 2, Vol. 12 no. 3, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism, (Spring–Autumn, 1984), 333–358. 3 International debates in the 1970s and 1980s within feminist philosophy, political theory, and aesthetics questioned whether we could assume shared characteristics (and thus interests) common to all women. International journals that influenced this debate in Australia through articles and translations included m/f (UK) and Signs (USA). In Australia, see articles and translations in publications by the Sydney-based Working Papers Collective and Local Consumption; the cultural politics journal Intervention; the Australian Feminist Review and articles from the early 1980s in the visual arts journal LIP. 4 Fernanda Martins, “A Nagarabul Woman from NSW”, participated in the 1977 Women’s Art Show at the Experimental Art Foundation. Thanks to event co-organiser Julie Ewington for this reminder. 5 See Talking Up Textiles: Community Fabric and Indigenous Industry, A Report from the 2012 Forum at Gunbalanya, (Darwin: ANKAAA, 2013). 6 In 1978, elders from the Indulkana community settlements travelled from the APY lands to Adelaide to run an introductory song, dance, and cultural education workshop for South Australian WAM members. In 1982 Norah Bindle, a Ritarrngu artist living in Katherine (NT), designed and painted a section of the collaborative feminist mural Women at the Edge of Town, near the Art Gallery of NSW for the 1982 Women & Arts Festival. Bindle was in Sydney as a member of a Native Title negotiating team, and took the opportunity to hold a solo exhibition of her work at Hogarth Galleries in Paddington (personal communication between Chips Mackinolty and Jo Holder, 2016). Aboriginal women’s art was also discussed in the feminist art journal LIP in the 1970s, see “Aboriginal Women Ritual and Culture—Diane Bell interviewed by Lesley Dumbrell”, 9LIP (1978/79), 5–9. 7 In Australia, the “sexual revolution” arose from the sexualisation of post-war consumer culture, the popularisation of scientific reports on human sexual response (Kinsey; Masters and Johnson), the availability of the Pill in Australia in 1961, and the emergence of the Women’s Liberation movement. See Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle, “Sexuality

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and the Suburban Dream”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, Vol. 15 no. 2 (1979), 4–15 and Susan Magarey, “The Sexual Revolution as Big Flop: Women’s Liberation Lesson One”, Dangerous Ideas—Women’s Liberation—Women’s Studies— Around the World, (Adelaide, Australia: University of Adelaide Press, 2014), 15–25. 8 Ailsa O’Connor, “What Has Happened to Women Artists—A Personal View”, talk given at Women’s Art Forum meeting, Melbourne University May 1974, printed posthumously in Unfinished Work: Articles and Notes on Women and the Politics of Art, (Melbourne: Greenhouse Press, 1982), 26. Unfortunately, many of her paintings from these formative war years are now lost. See also Janine Burke, “Silence into image: Women of the 1940s”, Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, (London: South Bank Centre, 1988), 66. 9 On this characterisation of expressionism in Australian modernism, see Ann-Marie Willis, Illusions of Identity: The Art of Nation, (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1993), 48–58. 10 Ailsa O’Connor, “Being Underground During the Heroic Years”, Unfinished Work, 1982, 35. 11 Ailsa O’Connor, “What Has Happened to Women Artists—A Personal View”, Unfinished Work, 28. 12 O’Connor visited Europe in 1971 (including England, Italy, and Greece), China in 1977, and in 1979, she lived in Rome for eight months. Correspondence with the artist’s family, May 20, 2020. 13 See Charles Merewether, Art & Social Commitment: An End to the City of Dreams 1931–1948, (Sydney, Australia: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1984). 14 Correspondence with the artist’s family, May 22, 2020. 15 See Ailsa O’Connor, “International Women’s Day—Rome”, Unfinished Work, 228–235. 16 See Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence—New Essays on Social, Political and Aesthetic Theory (ed. Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall), (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 26. 17 “National Museum of Australia, “Collaborating for Indigenous Rights”, https://www. indigenousrights.net.au/organisations/pagination/womens_christian_temperance_ union_wctu. 18 Marie Lean, in interview. “Margaret Pammet, Marie Lean, Muriel Goss and Pat Flintoft: The Union of Australian Women”, in Jenny Barber, Women’s Movement South Australia, (Adelaide: Experimental art Foundation, undated, c.1979), 15. 19 Ailsa O’Connor, “Organising the Asian Australian Child Art Exchange”, Unfinished Work, 209. 20 O’Connor was a delegate at the 1953 World Congress of Women in Copenhagen, where she probably discussed the idea of cultural exchanges with (unnamed) fellow delegates from Asia, and with the US peace activist Olive Mayer, who had organised cultural exchanges of American and Soviet women during the McCarthy era, and who became a life-long friend. In the 1950s, O’Connor notes similar exchanges of child art in the US as an influence. She successfully sought sponsorship for the Asian-Australian Child Art Exchange from Melbourne University’s Education Department and from the Indian diplomat and politician Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, first female president of the United National General Assembly. O’Connor also noted at the time that the project would not have gotten off the ground without the initial collection of “fifty drawings by Chinese children presented to the UAW by the Chinese Women’s Federation for the 1st June celebrations”. Ailsa O’Connor, “Organising the Asian Australian Child Art Exchange”, Unfinished Work, 213; additional information kindly relayed by the artist’s family. 21 Ibid., 209. 22 See commentaries by Vivienne Binns in Beverley Garlick, “Vivienne Binns: Interview” Refractory Girl No. 8 (March 1975), 7–15 and in Elizabeth Ashton, Lesbian Art: An Encounter With Power, (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1996), 73; Catriona Moore, “Museum Hygeine”, Photofile No. 41 (March 1994), 8–14 and Helen Grace and Ann Stephen, “Where do positive images come from? And what does a woman want?”, Scarlet Woman, 1981, reprinted in edited form in Dissonance: feminism and the Arts 1970– 90 (ed. Catriona Moore), (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 80–91.

104  Jacqueline Millner and Catronia Moore 23 Vivienne Binns, 2002, From Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia (ed. Anne Gray), (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2002), https://artsearch.nga.gov. au/detail.cfm?IRN=116421&PICTAUS=TRUE. 24 In the mid-1960s, Binns was working closely with Mike Brown, a member of a local, pop/neo-dada group exhibiting between 1962 and 1963 as the “Annandale Imitation Realists” (with Colin Lanceley and Ross Crowthall). 25 Merryn Gates, Vivienne Binns: Twentieth First Century Paintings, (Sydney: Cross Arts Projects, April-May 2004). 26 Vivienne Binns: Paintings and Constructions was held in 1967 at Watters Gallery in Sydney. All works in the exhibition are dated 1967. 27 Vivienne Binns, “Vivienne Binns in Interview”, Scarlet Woman Special Issue on Women in the Visual Arts (August 1975): 8. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Frances Phoenix, Queen of spades 1975, (previously known as Kunda 1976), found doily on cotton, plastic zipper, 50.0 × 42.0 × 3.0 cm. Collection of Toni Robertson, Sydney. 31 See Louise Mayhew, “No Goddesses, No Mistresses: A Tactile History of the Australian Women’s Domestic Needlework Group (c.1976 –1980)”, paper presented at the 4th Annual Feminist Art History Conference, American University, Washington, DC, USA, 2013, https://www.academia.edu/5242323/No_Goddesses_No_Mistresses_A_tactile_ history_of_the_Australian_Women_s_Domestic_Needlework_Group_c.1976_80. 32 See Michael Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 303–436. 33 As trans folks in the US reminded cis women when they called out the pussy-centered culture of the 2016 post-election Women’s Marches. See discussion in “Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now: The Place of Vaginas in Black Feminist Theory & Organizing”, The CRUNK Feminist Collection, January 23, 2017, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2017/01/23/ pussy-dont-fail-me-now-the-place-of-vaginas-in-black-feminist-theory-organizing/. 34 Ibid, 66. 35 Una Rey, "Women in the Cross-Cultural Studio: Invisible Tracks in the Indigenous Artist's Archive," in Outtakes: Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary Art, ed. Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 39–56. See also Geoffrey and James Bardon, Papunya: A Place Made after the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2004) and Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons, (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 36 Hilda (Cookie) Pwerl, Stirling, 1998, (trans. Jenny Green), in Jenny Green, “Singing the Silk: Utopia Batik”, Raiki Wara: Long Cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait, (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998), 41. 37 Jenny Green, “Singing the Silk: Utopia Batik”, 44. 38 Kathleen Petyarre, Atneltyey, 1988. (trans. Jenny Green,) cited Jenny Green, ibid. 39 Paola Bella, “Aboriginal Resistance, Healing and Matriarchy”, interview for The Art Show, on Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Commission, November 21, 2019. 40 Celeste Liddle, “Looking Past White Australia and White Feminism”, Real Matilda, March 9, 2016, https://newmatilda.com/2016/03/09/looking-past-white-australia-and-white-feminism/. 41 “I cannot suddenly reconcile the idea that taking on oppressive practices which have been imposed upon white women for centuries becomes suddenly empowering when done in an Indigenous context. It doesn’t”. Celeste Liddle, “Looking Past White Australia and White Feminism”. 42 Jennifer Isaacs, “The Language of Clay: Thancoupie’s Ceramics”, Thancoupie, (Brisbane: Brisbane City Gallery, 2001), 9. 43 The mining giant Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation (later Comalco) leased the land surrounding the mission from the Queensland Government. 44 Thancoupie’s life was beset with tragedy: she lost her twins to tuberculosis when they were seven, and also her father, who was in uniform during World War II two and was killed in a Japanese bombardment of Thursday Island. Napranum is a saltwater

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community, and whilst a relatively young newlywed, Thancoupie’s husband Tom was also lost at sea. Jennifer Isaacs, Thancoupie the Potter, (Sydney: The Aboriginal Artists Agency, 1982). 45 Thancoupie, cited Jennifer Isaacs, Thancoupie the Potter, 25. 46 One of Thancoupie’s teachers was the Californian émigré and feminist sculptor Joan Grounds, who was artist-in-residence and later director of the Tin Sheds (1968–1979) and member of the Sydney-based Women’s Art Movement (1974–1976). Thancoupie’s other teachers at ESTC/NAS were Derek Smith, Bernard Sahm, Shiga Shigeo, Peter Travis and head of ceramics Peter Rushforth. 47 Kirsten Fitzpatrick, “Introduction”, Thancoupie, (Brisbane: Brisbane City Gallery, 2001), 6. 48 “Thanakupi, Indigenous Australian Ceramic Artist”, https://www.veniceclayartists. com/tag/thancoupie/. 49 Jennifer Isaacs, Thancoupie the Potter, 29. 50 Jennifer Isaacs, “The Language of Clay: Thancoupie’s Ceramics”, 10. 51 Cited Ulli Beier, “Thancoupie”, Long Water: Aboriginal Art and Literature, Aspect #34 (August 1986), 91. 52 See Jenifer Isaacs, “Thancoupie, (1937–2011)”, https://www.jenniferisaacs.com.au/ thancoupie/. 53 “An Interview with Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak”, Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Boundary 2, Vol. 20 no. 2 (Summer, 1993), 24–50. 54 Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019), 21. Thanks to Dashiell Moore for bringing Yunkaporta’s writing to our attention. 55 Creation I is now in the contemporary Aboriginal art collection of the Museum of Australia. Creation II and III were collected for the Comalco head office in Weipa. 56 Jennifer Isaacs, Thancoupie the Potter, 60. 57 Thancoupie, cited Jennifer Isaacs, Ibid. 60. 58 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, (trans. by Betsy Wing), (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 131. 59 Vivienne Binns organised the ground-breaking, workshop-based NSW community arts projects Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories (1979–1981) and Full Flight (1982). 60 Doreen Mellor, “Thancoupie: Creating Communities”, Thancoupie, (Brisbane: Brisbane City Gallery, 2001), 42. 61 S.J. Norman and Meg Wilson in discussion, Vitalstatistix, Adelaide. posted 11 August 2017, http://vitalstatistix.com.aublog/SJ-norman-and-meg-wilson/. 62 Celeste Liddle, “Intersectionality and Indigenous Feminism: An Aboriginal Woman’s Perspective”, The Postcolonialist, June 25, 2014, http://postcolonialist.com/civil-discourse/ intersectionality-indigenous-feminism-aboriginal-womans-perspective/.

6

Tseng Kwong Chi 1979 and the Liminal Trans of Racial and Sexual Politics Jane Chin Davidson

In 1979 I went to Provincetown, and I ran into a funny beach house; I happened to have my Chinese costume with me and that is how I did my first self-portrait. Then, I took a trip around the USA, being interested in finding out what Americans worship in their country. I followed the trail of the typical places they love to visit.1 Photographer Tseng Kwong Chi began his East Meets West series in 1979 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a tourist destination sometimes known as Queersville, USA, with a reputation for being a paradise for White gay men. Its status as a “gay Mecca” emerged in the 1950s when a non-normative tourist community, including some gays of colour, descended on the location at land’s end and continued visiting for the next 50 or so years. Before the onset of the AIDS epidemic, Provincetown’s acreage of sand dunes, along with the bay beach known as the “dick-dock”, were opportune places for anonymous public sex. 2 Karen Krahulik describes the infamous local night-time scene at clubs where a “number of cross-dressing men and women waited on tables and performed”.3 For Tseng to begin his cross-dressing journey here represents something special, particularly when viewing the Provincetown cottage and the sand dunes in the two prints, both titled Provincetown (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). The most prominent subject in them is the landscape, and through Provincetown’s “location of culture,” the signifiers of Queersville and the Chinese painting tradition uniquely personify both queer and Chinese identity.4 Dressed in what would become his signature grey Mao uniform, the artist staged his raced queer persona as a constructed façade, a monument to his immigrant Chinese self, one that is mutually inclusive of the Cape Cod architecture in one photograph and the sand dune landscape in the other. The photographs exemplify the distinct way in which Tseng performed a complex transnational subjectivity that questioned Asian-American identity at the end of the 1970s—the politics of identity, after the 1960s civil rights movements, emerged from simplistic assumptions about what it meant to be American, Chinese, immigrant, male, and homosexual. Dressed in a uniform called the “Mao suit”, Tseng performed as an ambassador ostensibly from China, exiled in the aftermath of Mao Zedong’s death just three ears prior in 1976, during the final days of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. Beneath the masquerade, Tseng was not from Communist China but was born in British Hong Kong, emigrating in 1966 with his family to Canada, then finally relocating in 1978 to New York.5 The Cape Cod backdrop ironically reflects Tseng’s residential status; the modest and unadorned clapboard house is a working-class

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Figure 6.1  Tseng Kwong Chi, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1979, from the self-portrait series East Meets West, 1979–1989, 15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1 cm). © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.

exterior typical of the American norm. But in the violent history of the establishment of colonial America, the “New England” claim is one that cannot be reconciled with its immigrant history. The rights of White settlers are generally uncontested, while ethnic immigrants are always “suspect”. Tseng’s masquerade parodies this fact; his “Chinese drag” ridicules the orientalist communist cliché while referring overall to disparate discourses: French Marxist-Maoist intellectualism, the Chinese-American identity politics of the 1970s, and the AIDS identity of the 1980s. Setting the stage for the over 150 landscapes to come in the Expeditionary Series (1979–1989), the Provincetown house functions as an outsized closet from which to disclose the specific sexual and racial polemics in these historical contexts. Tseng’s photo-repetitions exemplify what Amelia Jones describes as the deconstructionist urge to “account for identification (if not ‘identity’ in the 1970s sense) [by] acknowledging how

108  Jane Chin Davidson

Figure 6.2  Tseng Kwong Chi, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1979, from the self-portrait series East Meets West, 1979–1989, 14.2 × 14.2 in. (36 × 36 cm). © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.

we interpret and give value to art or visual culture” (original emphases).6 Jones’s anti-colonialist use of “queer feminist durationality” as a “mode of relational interpretation that affects both ‘art’ and ‘interpreter’” speaks to Tseng’s particular kind of time-based practice.7 As Jones puts it, it holds the “potential for doing something with artworks through interpretation that, I want to argue, reactivates them by returning them to process and embodiment—linking the interpreting body of the present with bodies referenced or performed in the past as the work of art”.8 Through his artistic performance in association with photographic location, he empowers the queer self-as-other on a transnational level by creating images that confound landscape-photography’s White-heteronormative past while also transforming the aesthetic embodiment from the Chinese landscape tradition. As this chapter explores, Tseng offers a queered vision of art and its interpretation, which could be understood as a form of cultural translation.

Tseng Kwong Chi 109 Based on Jones’s theory, the sand dune photograph, in contrast to Cape Cod Provincetown, emulates Chinese literati painting, conveying the transnational (and transgenerational) artistic innovation of Tseng’s lens-based conceptualism. This version of Provincetown reads like a Chinese scroll, as the photograph stages the figure in mist with an emptiness that is evocative of the original ideal in Song dynasty monumental landscape painting. The recurring figure of Tseng in his self-portraits refers to the traveller of mountains and streams and the tenth century shanshui practice that was always performed by the viewer of paintings. But according to Susan Bush, one of the most revered shanshui artists, Guoxi, had written that “concentrating on figures leads to vulgarity”, because the Daoist process depended on the painter’s “nearly mystical appreciation of the actual landscape” above all other painting subjects.9 The self-portraying Tseng did not follow the figurative protocol. The artist had studied traditional Chinese brush since the age of ten, which was the starting point for his artmaking career.10 Later, he became a student of photography at the Academie Julien in Paris before moving to New York where he changed his English name, Joseph, to go by his Chinese name, Kwong Chi. I argue in this essay that, through photography, Tseng performs and records a uniquely transnational approach, not only to artistic practices, but to the transgressive sexual politics, transcultural feminist discourses and translational critical debates that pertained to Chinese identity in the United States as differentiated from China during the late 1970s moment. Tseng combines his performative masquerade with the use of photographic evidence, his “being there” at Provincetown in 1979, as he embarks on his émigré’s journey to iconic landmarks across the United States. Aligning with José Esteban Muñoz’s queer disidentification, his definition for gay/ drag artists who use parody to disempower the homophobic stereotype, Tseng’s figure in the landscape rehabilitates queer from its negative connotation. However, Chinese drag represents so much more. As exemplified by both versions of Provincetown, his focus on the performing “self” amidst monumental landscapes both verifies and contradicts the illusory praxis of the photographic medium. The works discussed in this essay are examples of performance-photography, a distinction informed by Jones’s analysis of the specific strategy adopted by photographers who implement the exaggerated theatricality of I-is-the-other in self-performance; the “subject performs herself or himself within the purview of an apparatus of perspectival looking that freezes the body as representation’ in such a way that ‘opens up an entirely new way of thinking about photography and the racially, sexually, and gender-identified subject”.11 Tseng’s documentation of his performative acts captures the real/liveness of his raced embodiment inseparable from the illusory Mao subject of his work. This chapter begins by situating the race/queer subject expressed by Tseng’s milieu in the 1970s—Tseng questioned his Asian-American identity at a time when Chinese masculinity was considered “effeminate” in US society. Tseng would have known about Frank Chin, who was among the Asian-American critics examining the way that early cinema had instantiated racialised fag Chinese stereotypes to demean and disempower. Amidst these contentions, the Mao suit was conversely interpreted as an ostentatious signifier of a powerful Chinese revolution, dramatically different from the emasculated depiction of Chinese men in American society (a public that knew very little about the uniforms of China’s Socialist Revolution). In Europe, however, leftist intellectuals in the 1960s had already adopted Maoist approaches to the Marxist discourse, epitomised by Louis Althusser’s structuralist apparatuses,

110  Jane Chin Davidson which were influenced by Mao’s 1937 essay “On Contradiction”.12 It should be noted that much of the Foucauldian methodology in feminist theory was influenced by this development in poststructuralism. The translational conflicts of Chineseness (the difference in production of meaning in China and the United States) guide the distinct pace of this chapter. Gay masculinity and immigration, which Tseng monumentalises in three of his 1979 works, were the most debated twentieth-century subjects in Chinese-American studies. In San Francisco, his self-portrait in front of the Golden Gate Bridge reflects the symbol of the émigré’s gateway, whereas his Mao figure as captured in Hollywood Hills and Paramount City offers a contrasting persona to cinema’s yellowface masculinities. The sheer volume of works in the Expeditionary Series presents a lens-based challenge to the American stereotypes propagated by early twentieth-century movies. But Frank Chin also implicated the feminist critiques of Chinese women authors, including Maxine Hong Kingston, who depicted the masculinist devaluation of females in Chinese culture perpetuated by the patriarchal ideal—male sons were revered for continuing the male line while female daughters were considered a burden on the family.13 During the same period of China’s Cultural Revolution, however, the Red Guard “women warriors” illustrated yet another transnational divergence from Kingston’s feminism in the United States. Following Jones’s aims for queer feminist durationality, the final goal of this chapter is to become “more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture”,14 since the disparate Chinese contexts coexist today as they did in the 1970s. The important feminist debates of that time enfolding Chinese-American feminism and China’s women’s movement are rarely connected to the artistic production of Chinese artists. The coexisting diversity of discourses and debates raised by Tseng’s work reveal the contradictions of Chineseness—the Chinese immigrant subject of the 1970s was transnationally connected to the Maoist subject; whereby, Tseng’s Chinese-American conceptualism ultimately corresponds to China’s xiandai yishu modern art that emerged in the 1980s (which figures prominently in my other research). While I have addressed the concept of Chineseness more thoroughly elsewhere, I defer to Meiling Cheng’s definition of its historical and contemporary meaning: Chineseness is an “ambiguous, fluid and [a] potentially deterritorialised concept which may be employed by individual subjects—native, diasporic, sinophonic or affiliated by choice—as a multivalent identity marker”.15 The “trans” for theorising transnational studies of gender and sexuality takes into account the circulation of identities no differently than the flow of goods and people in global capitalism.

Snow Queen The East Meets West series, also known as the Expeditionary Series, was a tenyear commitment completed two years before Tseng died of AIDS in 1990.16 The only sexual reference in the entirety of the 150 Ambiguous Ambassador photographs was denoted on the identification badge Tseng wore as part of his costume, which announced “Slutforart”, a run-on word that he jokingly used as an official title. But Dan Bacalzo suggests that the “slut” self-naming is associated with the indiscriminate mixing of photographic identities and signifiers, since, at the time, the “connotations of promiscuous sexuality [was] highly at odds with the stereotype of the Asian and/or

Tseng Kwong Chi 111 Asian American male, who often tends to be desexualized”. The depths of ambiguity engaged by Tseng raises questions about who he was, and as such, I want to begin this study with the characterisation of the artist that his sister, the dancer Muna Tseng, and writer/director Ping Chong presented in 1999, during the performance SlutForArt a.k.a. Ambiguous Ambassador, a montage of dance, photographs and recorded dialogues by artists and friends paying homage to Tseng’s memory. Among those included in the dialogues were Tseng’s partner, Robert-Kristoffer Haynes, and the dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones, who contributed to an interview with Ping Chong. Tseng belonged to New York’s “neo-Dadaist East Village art scene” with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Ann Magnuson, and Jones, who once suggested that Tseng’s portraiture in Chinese drag “shows the silliness of identity and cuts to the heart of American iconography”.18 His and Ping’s characterisation of Tseng after his death acknowledges the judgments of race, sex, and gender that have now changed in the twenty-first century. 17

VO [Voiceover] PING: How did you meet KC [Kwong Chi]?… VO KRISTOFFER: We met at Twilight, the only gay Asian bar at the time. VO PING: What’s Twilight like? VO KRISTOFFER: Asian men go there to meet Caucasian men and Caucasian men go there to meet Asian men and people drink and try to pick each other up. I thought he looked very sexy in his Mao suit. VO BILL: I think he described himself to me once as a snow queen, any person of color who prefers white men and yet by the same token, he was very aware of the races and the way in which Asian people were viewed, and I think that’s what I saw a lot in his work. He was taken aback that I was, in a way, before people were really talking about identity politics.19 But what exactly did the American iconography of the “snow queen” signify in the environment of gay bars like Twilight in 1979? The period leading up to the acknowledgment of the AIDS epidemic in the gay community was described by Leo Bersani as the “unbridled poppered promiscuity of the 1970s, of our perverse preference for five or ten partners in the bathhouse over the one-and-only in the drug-free privacy of a suburban home”. 20 Bersani writes a definition of the AIDS identity as defiant against judgmental shaming by homophobic 1970s society. He concludes that AIDS made gay men more visible “because AIDS has made us fascinating…. since straight America was fascinated, either “sympathetically or malevolently”. 21 During this period of (White) AIDs history, Tseng, the “gay AIDS artist” was largely ignored— his work not receiving notable recognition until the twenty-first century. Tseng’s self-recognition of his snow queen identity challenges the sexual and racial taboos surrounding the desire of Asian men for White men. The snow queen identity confounds Frank Chin’s excoriation of the stereotype of Chinese men, typecast as either “effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan and, at their worst, are homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu”. 22 Chin’s description of gay Asian-White desire would have been influenced by his homophobic characterisation of “the fulfilment of white male homosexual fantasy, literally kissing white ass”. 23 Queerness in relation to Asian-American masculinity is depicted by weird subservient caricatures in popular culture, as evidenced in Tseng’s 1979 Disney Land, CA, his photograph of the Ambassador next to Mickey Mouse. Here, Tseng’s masculinity reads as equal to the sexuality of the fictional cartoon character. When the relations of power in American

112  Jane Chin Davidson culture have for so long been under White heteronormative privilege (especially in visual representation), the idea that there is such a thing as free choice in one’s intimate life is crucial to the progressive process. The racial judgments and sexual taboos that dominated during Tseng’s liminal period are now discussed in discourses and debates within disparate transnational feminisms and contradictory queer politics. As Grewal and Kaplan explain, the “globalized framework of encounter and exchange” in today’s power relations “are connected to inequalities that result from earlier forms of globalization”.24 The recent historicising of queer representation in art compels the need for an accounting of the 1979 moment, and Tseng’s photography offers a nexus for the bifurcated subjects of gender, sexuality and race in China and the United States.

China and Mao’s Empty Suit Tseng’s expression in the Mao suit represented something more meaningful than just the parody of an authoritarian ruler, since he performs with the landscape to establish the symbolic monuments in his photographs. In China, the Chairman was often monumentalised wearing the uniform in socialist realist statues. The Zhongshan Zhuang is considered a formal type of military attire, originally named after the Nationalist leader Sun Yatsen, whose political party was defeated by Mao in the Communist victory of 1949. The uniform came in different styles (double breasted, two-three pockets, darts) and colours of blue, grey, and green cotton, wool, or synthetic material. It is important to note that women wore the suit (Fig. 6.3), especially the style with the turned down collar introduced in the 1950s. 25 The significance of military uniforms for assigning positions among party membership was not to be taken lightly. In the early 1960s period of the Cultural Revolution, the attire of the People’s Liberation Army, consisting of green jacket, red-starred cloth cap, and red armband, would literally transform young middle school girls into Red Guard militants. The Liberation costume empowered these young girls to violently attack the “class enemies” who were frequently their teachers and neighbours. 26 By all accounts, Mao was committed to the equality ideal of women holding up “half the sky”. However, in his 1961 poem titled Militia Women, he reveals the way in which his mandate was actually a form of militarising women to support his revolution. Dressing the part was essential: “Early rays of sun illumine the parade grounds / and these handsome girls heroic in the wind,/with rifles five feet long./ Daughters of China with a marvelous will,/you prefer hardy uniforms to colorful silk”. 27 At the time, Mao was often seen in news photographs and revolutionary film wearing a similar military uniform. Most historians suggest that the male norm in China’s relations of power was never really reversed, because gender equality was restricted to the Revolution’s masculinisation of females for a genderless class. Others believe that the female Red Guard was powerful nonetheless, breaking the patriarchal norms through their cross dressing as male soldiers. Women challenging the old guard emblematised the whole of the Cultural Revolution. But the Mao suit also held meaning within a vastly different intellectual culture in Europe, which embraced China’s Marxism on behalf of capitalist resistance. The liberation of Chinese women was understood to be an outcome of the Cultural Revolution. Studies like Julia Kristeva’s 1974 About Chinese Women advocated for the ostensible Chinese matrilineal model. Italian journalist Maria Antonietta

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Figure 6.3  Photograph of Mao Zedong with his daughter Li Na in Beijing, 1953, silver gelatin black and white photograph, 7.9 × 9.6 in. (20 × 24.5 cm). Photograph by Hou Bo. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Macciocchi’s 1972 book Daily Life in Revolutionary China paved the way for the 1974 trip to China organised by the Tel Quel literary intellectuals including Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Phillippe Sollers, and Marcelin Pleynet. The French leftist interest in the Chinese socialist alternative manifested in academic endeavours across the Marxist idealisms of feminist theorists, social historians, and philosophers. 28 Perry Anderson asserts that “the wave of sympathy and admiration for the Cultural Revolution swept up a very broad range of socialist intellectuals, not to speak of student militants”, which invigorated Marxist discourse in Europe and the United States. 29 Of course, the reality of China’s totalitarian Communism would be exposed after the Cultural Revolution in 1976, especially by artists such as Ai Weiwei, whose poet father Ai Qing was sent to a penal camp, even though he was a major figure in the 1942 Talks at Yanan, the first espousal of the anti-bourgeois ideology for the arts.30 By the 1960s, Mao denounced artists and intellectuals for their dissemination of “rightest art”.

114  Jane Chin Davidson Throughout the twentieth century, the socialist ideals of Marx were relinquished by the political movements of Communist dictatorships, whereas Marxist intellectual movements retained them. The current model for deconstructive identity politics emerged as a transnationalist reading of Marxist critical theory, beginning with Althusser’s 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”.31 Althusser was a student of Mao’s writings and Foucault was a student of Althusser’s. There is no question that Maoist Marxism was influential to French feminism as the very foundation of Foucauldian structures of sexual knowledge and gender constructions. Anderson traces the history of “Subject and Structure” by reviewing the impact of the ‘protestations’ by Althusser’s “former pupil Foucault”, who declared Marxism to be “an out-dated Victorian episteme” that had accelerated the formation of Althusser’s structuralism nonetheless.32 The discourse on heteronormativity addressed in Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” is connected to the philosophies and theories that emerged from Tel Quel, French feminism and the poststructuralists that came after Althusser. As Camille Robcis suggests, Maoism and structuralism need to be reviewed “dialogically” to provide a transnational update for an “intellectual history that attends, as Susan Buck-Morss has urged us, ‘to the edges of systems, the limits of premises, the boundaries of our historical imagination in order to trespass, trouble, and tear these boundaries down’”.33 The “trans” of the transnational recognises the transgressive aspects of crossing intellectual borders. As portrayed by Tseng, the figure of Mao has always been implicitly at the boundaries of the historical imagination. As such, the artist performs the ambiguities of the empty Mao suit—a signifier of politics that Europeans and North Americans have often used to mean whatever they want.

The Monument to Immigration Related to Tseng’s migration from Hong Kong, the focal frame of his 1979 Expeditionary photographs are familiar monuments in the American landscape: the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Hollywood sign and Paramount arch in Los Angeles. In her discussion of Tseng’s work, Lucy Lippard asserts that “landscapes tend to be immediately translated into the symbolic, as though there is no other way to look at them”.34 Tseng’s insertion of what Jones describes as the I as Other to the self, in the self-portraiture of San Francisco (1979) at the iconic location of the Golden Gate Bridge, achieves two transnational effects: first, the artist renews the “figure in the landscape” painting tradition, and second, he implements the evidence and illusion function of photography’s symbolic regime. As the focal point of the photograph, Tseng is standing erect in front of the single-point perspective of the historic 1.7-mile bridge built in 1937, his body placed parallel to the suspension tower to emulate its vertical stance. In this stately pose, the artist is equally as monumental as the bridge, and the visibility of his cable shutter release emphasises his powerful control over the artistic event. Conversely, the camera angle places the viewer in the position of looking upward at the artist from below, very much like looking up at a statue with a reverent gaze. This gaze is the most powerful element in creating the photographic message, as both the figure and the monument become one symbol surrounded by a transcendent land—and cityscape— the bridge represents him as he connotes the bridge’s place in Chinese immigrant history. As Barthes explains, photographic denotation is defined by “the scene [that]

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Figure 6.4  View of Golden Gate from Angel Island, 2013, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Reproduction number, LC-USZ62-123456.

‘really’ happened: the photographer had to be there (original italics)”, establishing the documentary gaze cast toward immigrant history.35 When émigrés arrived at the Angel Island station in San Francisco’s Bay, the most conspicuous image in their field of vision would have been Tseng’s view of the Golden Gate Bridge (Fig. 6.4). This emotional beacon was symbolic of the journey out of China to face the scrutiny of the gatekeepers of the “Golden Mountain”, Gam Saan, the Cantonese name for the fantasy place of the United States. Nan Alamilla Boyd traces the beginnings of both the immigrant and gay male population to the 1849 gold rush, which initiated the “traffic in liquor, gambling, and prostitution that earned the city its reputation for vice”, especially because the “homosocial environment of saloons and dance halls” in the neighbourhoods of Chinatown, Barbary Coast, and North Beach provided entertainment for a disproportionately unmarried male workforce.36 But the xenophobic reaction to the influx of Chinese migrants in California resulted in the legislation of the 1875 Page Act, whereby the detention centre at Angel Island was designed in 1902 to process primarily Chinese women who had to prove that they were not prostitutes. San Francisco remains a quintessential Chinese diasporic location for immigrants from the coastal cities of China, the laojia ancestral roots of Tseng’s family. Tseng visually bridges his father’s decision to move his family to Hong Kong from Shanghai after fighting for the Nationalist Army against the Japanese occupation in Manchuria (ending in 1945). 37 The black-and-white photograph reads historically and nostalgically through the mirrored reflection of his clouded glasses,

116  Jane Chin Davidson representing the unseeable density of San Francisco’s diasporic and queer history. But for Tseng, who had lived the queer immigrant journey, the meaning of San Francisco’s gateway is poignantly monumental.

Paramount Masculinities The immigrant subject lends historical realism to Tseng’s work. As Barthes wrote, the semiotic referent of the photograph—the thing it represents—is always too real because the photograph still serves as evidence in the court of law. In contrast to the monumental real of the Golden Gate bridge, Tseng’s Hollywood Hills (1979) places the sign in the distance to serve as the actual horizon line that cuts the picture plane into horizontal halves. Built in 1923 near Los Angeles as a kind of billboard for selling upscale real estate in “Hollywoodland”, the Hollywood sign represents the construction of a place that developed into an industry for producing film fantasies and celebrity personae. “Hollywood” functions in this depiction as the unattainable marker of achievement for the figure of Tseng in the foreground, who is facing the opposite direction. The dark hue of the sky above casts a pall on the light of the vanishing point. Similar to San Francisco, the viewer of this image looks up at the actor/ ambassador, the monumental figure who never looks back at you. Since the Hollywood sign was erected in 1923, American cinema has created, embodied, and established the detrimental stereotypes that have typecast Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans overall. The characters include the Hop Sing domestic and the Fu Manchu, who are yellowface caricatures of Chinese men, distinct from the Anna May Wong exotica and dragon lady characters assigned to Chinese women. The continuing absence today of anything resembling a “normal” depiction of Chinese people by Hollywood confirms the prevailing impact of early film. Viewers never actually got to see a heroic Chinese character in 1930s film, and Tseng’s Ambiguous Ambassador reproduced a title masculine role that does not emulate past depictions. And if any of the characters, from Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan, could be described as heroic, these types of “Chinese” men were played by White actors. Looking closely at Tseng’s 1979 self-portrait in Paramount Pictures, the arched entryway of the film studio serves as another frame inside of the photographic frame. If viewed through the lens of Hollywood’s impact on Chinese identity, one could argue that Tseng relinquishes the statuesque “self” in this particular portrait. Unlike his other heroic depictions in front of monumental buildings, the artist here is diminished, engulfed by the architecture that symbolises the foundation of cinema. Tseng’s roleplaying for Paramount points to his conceptual practice, which was concurrent with the 1970s debates concerning Chinese-American sexual politics that circulated within the discourses of Asian American visual studies. As noted earlier, Tseng’s “acting” in the Chinese Nationalist-Communist uniform operates as a performance-art masquerade of military masculinity, but how was this role-playing commensurate with the Hollywood studio stereotype of Chinese men? The reproductions of photography are connected to filmic media through the embodiment of characters driving the movie narrative. The filmic-text exposes social norms and the construction of race. Frank Chin describes the impact of characterisations of Chinese masculinity, such as the “evil Dr. Fu Manchu [who] was not sexual, but homosexual” in his “long dress, batting his eyelashes, surrounded by muscular Black servants in loin clothes, and with his bad habit of caressingly touching White men on the

Tseng Kwong Chi 117 leg, wrist, and face with his long fingernails”. Chin argues that the “movies were teachers” and all Chinese men in early American film were passive “sissies… living to accommodate the whitemen” through their strange, awkward, clumsy, effeminate, and impotent characters.39 The emasculated men in early twentieth-century film diverged from the actual Chinese population, which was allowed to immigrate solely to work as labourers in masculine servitude. Their strenuous railroad and road building and gold mining were never accurately represented in film. Still, 90% of Chinese immigrants were male because the immigration laws denied entry to Chinese women.40 Moreover, Chinese labourers were not allowed to marry Whites because of miscegenation laws. By 1979, the real and imaginary depictions of Chinese males in the American consciousness circumscribed them to an impotent bind, and Chin had reacted by writing several bombastic critiques that unfortunately faulted feminism by implicating Chinese-American women authors. The most contentious was his targeting of The Woman Warrior, Hong Kingston’s feminist anthem based on her semiautobiographical articulation of girlhood experiences in misogynistic Chinese culture. The demands of male patrilineage in ancestor worship resulted in the privileging of male children. Kingston’s protagonist explains that, having been born a female, her mother said “I would grow up a wife and a slave”, but she rejected the subserviency: “I would have to grow up a warrior woman”.41 The idea that Kingston’s feminist fantasy tale, written to break from the hereditary oppression of Chinese women, would somehow perpetuate the emasculating of Chinese men turned into a full-fledged debate in Asian-American discourse. As literary theorist Benjamin Tong surmises, Kingston’s “feminist work [was] written with white acceptance in mind” while Frank Chin blames Kingston, along with David Henry Hwang and Amy Tan, for their cultural inauthenticity since they “boldly fake the best-known works from the most universally known body of Asian literature and lore in history”.42 But Chin was more vociferous in his accusations against Kingston who “with a stroke of white racist genius, attacks Chinese civilization, Confucianism itself” by confessing she was a “victim of Chinese misogyny”.43 The logic, in essence, conceives of a Chinese feminism that empowers a “white universality” that reinforces the emasculating Chinese male stereotypes by rejecting the Chinese patriarchal order and thus rejecting the entirety of the Chinese race. Chin’s critique reveals the segregation of intellectual debates that pertain to Chinese-American subjects as distinguished from those that pertain to China and the Red Guard “feminist” revolution. Also separated were the debates at the time by the European left whom, as I mentioned previously, were suspected of an intellectual tourism of China. In other words, the inauthenticity of Chinese culture was at stake among the various groups associated with Chineseness in the 1970s. My argument, in hindsight, is that Tseng’s use of photography, the most touristic practice by “foreign” visitors, actually critiques the fetishisation of authenticity. Tseng’s sister Muna confirms that he did not want to be identified as an AsianAmerican artist: “he hated that. He said, I’m an artist”.44 But as this chapter seeks to acknowledge, his photographic expression pointed to the immigrant sexual polemics in Chinese-American discourse. Still, most critics and historians focus predominantly on the fake parody as the performative message behind the Mao-suited Tseng situated in front of famous monuments. Lippard thought that “the imposition of the human figure, dwarfed or foregrounded, facing the camera or looking away into the 38

118  Jane Chin Davidson distance, is a classic juxtaposition of the sublime and the ridiculous”.45 She reiterates the ironic fakery of Tseng’s Chinese drag juxtaposed with his manipulation of the authentic landscape. During the 1970s moment when the caucuses for AfricanAmericans, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans first emerged, the contestation of fake Orientalism was more important than transnational engagements with identities in China and Chinese America (or other diaspora). I want to stress the importance of these masculinity debates and the different feminisms that Tseng had raised—their elision from intellectual history not only reveals the neglect of earlier transnational engagements, but also supports the need for a feminist queer durationality.

Mao Wallpaper By 1979, Mao’s cult of personality had far greater impact on his status in the United States than the violence of his Cultural Revolution. In New York, the reception to Tseng’s revolutionary costume reflected the Chairman’s celebrity status. Richard Martin, the curator of fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes how the artist was received at the THE MANCHU DRAGON-Costumes, 1644–1912 exhibition: “He shows up there in the Mao suit and I think no one knows whether this is a member of the press, whether this is, you know, an emissary from the Chinese government”.46 Like many performance artists at the time, Tseng used the persona as his blurring of art and life. Anti-Communist sentiments were slow to change in the United States, but as shown by Andy Warhol’s 1974 Mao Wallpaper exhibition in Paris, the Chairman’s cult aura had surpassed his intellectual brand of philosophical Marxism in Europe. The four acrylic and silkscreened portraits, 15-ft. tall, installed at the Musee Galliera would have been meaningful for the Tel Quel audience nonetheless. Not unlike Warhol’s other icons, such as Marilyn and Elvis, the artwork reduced Mao to a celebrity (post)modernist style. Since the portraits of Mao were “not based on political views or propaganda”, as explained by Anne Rorimer, “Warhol need not be concerned with making any further comment, statement, or judgment”.47 She went on to address the nature of art’s autonomy in the 1970s, and how, based on “the paradoxical levels of reality and artificiality in our culture, Warhol can manipulate these questions in terms of art, which has its own reality”.48 Rorimer’s statement acknowledges how the privileged position of the artworld and “its own reality” obviated the need to recognise the political subjects raised by Mao in the discourses of Asian-American identity or the Maoist/Marxist philosophies that this chapter has sought to examine through Tseng’s photographic lens. Instead, celebrity alienation from the real politics of China or Chinese America provided an opening for Warhol’s artificial appropriation of Chineseness. In this way, Tseng ultimately represented the “empty suit” of Mao by developing his own indexicality of Chineseness across the illusions and realities of discourses as much as he inserted himself in Chinese drag across geographical terrains. In conclusion, I want to return to the two Provincetown prints, the pictures representing the earnest beginnings for Tseng’s “grand tour”. Unlike the monuments he captured in 1979, both the Cape Cod cottage and the sand dunes photographs appear to represent private rather than public icons. One picture identifies the façade of its tourist gay community, the other renders a traditional Chinese landscape aesthetic: through the use of empty space, the Provincetown dunes seem entirely different from his other 1979 photographs. Tseng’s self-portrait here recalls the Southern Song paintings of Ma Yuan, whose figures were often the focal point, “more outstanding… less

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Figure 6.5  Ma Yuan, On a Mountain Path in Spring, c. 1190–1225, album leaf, ink and slight colour on silk, 10.8 × 17.0 in (27.4 × 43.1 cm). National Palace Museum. Licensed under Creative Commons.

landscape-centered”.49 His ink scroll, On a Mountain Path in Spring (1160) (Fig. 6.5) depicts the scholar going for a walk into the mist, symbolising communion with the great emptiness of Daoist contemplation. Ma’s practice exemplifies the break from the monumental landscape tradition of the Northern Song (960–1127). The earlier shanshui mountain and stream paintings were intended to engage a visual travel to nature, described by the painter Guoxi: “Without leaving your room you may sit to your heart’s content among streams and valleys”.50 The figures in these landscapes were usually imperceptibly drawn to convey the insignificance of humans; only the landscape should be monumental. But Ma focused on the figure as the monumental subject, showcasing the “shift in Southern Song landscape painting which turns away from representation”, explains Lian Duan, “and focuses on self-expression”.51 Ma represents a cultural shift, much in the way that Tseng engaged in the assertion of the “self” during a distinct moment of social change in the United States. The 1960s period of rights activism in the United States had impacted the 1970s decade of artistic multiculturalism. Cynthia Carr, writing for the Village Voice, concluded that “artists like Tseng Kwong Chi were part of a transitional moment, from the old white bohemia to a new, far more diverse culture of the margin”.52 Rejecting the position of the “margin” for Chinese queer subjects, Tseng chose to make himself the icon in every American landscape. He reframed the Orientalist stereotypes for masculinity through his Chinese drag, expressing a far greater expanse of artistic and political subjects than meets the eye. Through performance and photography, Tseng addressed the unrepresented by implementing the camera’s repetitious indexicality, inserting the figure in the landscape over and over again to monumentalise the queer transnational Chinese subject.

120  Jane Chin Davidson

Notes 1 Muna Tseng and Ping Chong, “SlutForArt,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 22 no. 1 (Jan. 2000): 124. 2 Karen Krahulik, “Cape Queer?” Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 52 no. 1–2 (2006): 197. 3 Ibid. 4 The phrase articulated by Homi K. Bhahba was a critique of mimicry and masquerade as a condition of identity and nationalism: Homi K. Bhahba, The Location of Culture (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994). 5 Tseng Kwong Chi, The Expeditionary Works (Houston: Houston Center for Photography, 1991), 27. 6 Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 1. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 174. 9 Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, eds, Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 142, 181. 10 The exhibition Tseng Kwong Chi: The Expeditionary Works was shown as a retrospective from February 28–April 12, 1992 Houston Center of Photography. The East Meets West photographs were clearly taken in the late 1970s up until early 1980s. The titles became interchangeable in the 1990s after Tseng’s death. 11 Amelia Jones, “The “Eternal Return”: Self Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment,” Signs, Vol. 27 no. 4 (Summer 2002): 948–949. 12 Mao Tse-Tung, On Contradiction (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967). 13 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York, NY: Knoft, 1976). 14 Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts, (London: Routledge, 2012), i. 15. See Meiling Cheng, Beijing Xingwei, Contemporary Chinese Time-Based Art (London: Seagull Books, 2013), 66. For my discussion on Chineseness, see Jane Chin Davidson, Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2019). 16 Iyko Day, “Tseng Kwong Chi and the Eugenic Landscape,” American Quarterly, Vol. 65 no. 1 (March 2013): 94. See Day for a thorough discussion of Tseng’s work on his Expeditionary Series. 17 Dan Bacalzo, “Portraits of Self and Other: "SlutForArt" and the Photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 53 no. 1 (Mar 2001): 87. 18 John Philip Habib, “A Life in ‘Chinese Drag’,” The Advocate: The National Gay and Lesbian News Magazine (April 2, 1984): 72. 19 Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 119–120. 20 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 20. 21 Ibid., 19. 22 Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds., The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (New York, NY: Meridian, 1991), xiii. 23 Ibid. 24 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 7 no. 4 (2001): 663. 25 Chris Berry and Zhang Shujuan, “Film and Fashion in Shanghai: What (Not) to Wear During the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Vol. 13 no. 1 (2018): 3. 26 See Li Li, “Uniformed Rebellion, Fabricated Identity: A Study of Social History of Red Guards in Military Uniforms during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Beyond,” Fashion Theory, Vol. 14 no. 4 (2010): 439–469. 27 Emily Honig, “Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards” in Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: UC Press, 2002), 263.

Tseng Kwong Chi 121 28 Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), xi. 29 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 73. 30 Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, ed. Bonnie McDougall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980). 31 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, NY and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 32 Ibid., 38. 33 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009),79. Cited in Robcis, “China in Our Heads”: Althusser, Maoism, and Structuralism,” 54. 34 Lucy R. Lippard, “Outside (But Not Necessarily Beyond) the Landscape,” Aperture, no. 150 (Winter 1998): 60. 35 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” Image-Music-Text (NY: Hill and Wang, 1977), 30. 36 Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town : A History of Queer San Francisco To 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 30. 37 Brian Dillon, “Tseng Kwong Chi, an ‘Ambiguous Ambassador’ to Life in America,” The New Yorker (June 23, 2019). 38 Frank Chin, "Confessions of the Chinatown Cowboy," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 4 no.3 (1972): 66. 39 Ibid. 40 See King-Kok Cheung, “The Woman Warrior Versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose Between Feminism and Heroism?” in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 235. 41 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 19. 42 Benjamin Tong, "Critic of Admirer Sees Dumb Racist," San Francisco Journal, 11 May 1977, 20; Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers,” in Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds., The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (New York, NY: Meridian, 1991), 3. 43 Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers,” 27. 44 Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 120. 45 Lippard, “Outside (But Not Necessarily Beyond) the Landscape,” 60. 46 Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 119. 47 Anne Rorimer, “Andy Warhol’s Mao,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, Vol. 69 no. 3 (May-June 1975): 7. 48 Ibid. 49 See Lian Duan, “Paradigm Shift in Chinese Landscape Representation,” Comparative Literature: East & West, Vol. 1 no. 1 (2017): 107. 50 Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 151. 51 Duan, “Paradigm Shift in Chinese Landscape Representation,” 107. 52 C. Carr, “Just Visiting This Planet,” The Village Voice, March 2, 1999. https://www. villagevoice.com/1999/03/02/just-visiting-this-planet/ (accessed August 25, 2019).

7

Shades of Discrimination The Emergence of Feminist Art in Apartheid South Africa Brenda Schmahmann

Like other South African women artists, Kim Siebert has coupled her focus “on personal history, cultural heritage and context” with “what it means to be perceived and to perceive the world as a woman artist in Africa”.1 These concerns also play out in What did your mother ever tell you about the Hard Edge School? (1986) (Fig. 7.1), an early work by Siebert (b. 1958), who currently lives in Taiwan. One of a number of collages from the 1980s in which she represented middle-class White women (constituted from cut-outs from magazines from the 1950s) in museum and domestic settings confronting “masterpieces” by males from the West, the work makes reference to the male gaze through the phallic binoculars that are in turn reiterated in pillars, the larger of which one female embraces seductively. A motif which might be read as a parody of the fetishistic objectification of female bodies’ commonplace in popular magazines and films, it also implies a link between hard-edge painting and the realms of the phallocentric. Related to collages Siebert made for a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Cape Town in the early 1980s, What did your mother ever tell you about the Hard Edge School? formed part of a group of works in which she engaged with ways in which the tropes and mechanisms in modernism had marginalised and objectified women. In a discussion in her thesis of one of her collages which depicts females confronting a painting by Picasso in a museum, Seibert observed a “disjuncture between the potential realizations of these women and their essential, though not necessarily inherent creativity”, while noting also that traditions of fine art have “often tended to preclude the heritage of many creative female contributions in the field of crafts”.2 What did your mother ever tell you about the Hard Edge School?, likewise, emphasises the way in which female creativity tends to be associated with embellishment of the home. In addition to drawing attention to the uneasy and pejorative distinction that tends to be drawn between the concepts of “abstraction” and “decoration” in Western discourses, Siebert makes reference to manifestations of the “decorative” amongst disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged groups in South Africa. The triangular designs featured on the frame of What did your mother ever tell you about the Hard Edge School? and the depicted screen or doorway on the left of the image refer to beadwork and basketry by isiXhosa and isiZulu speakers as well as to items such as embellished mat-racks made by the latter. The collage thus suggests that creative work made by not only Westernised middle-class White women but also Black working-class communities tends—through prejudice—to be afforded reduced status.

Shades of Discrimination 123

Figure 7.1  K im Siebert, What did your mother ever tell you about the Hard Edge School?, 1986, photo collage on board with painted frame. Courtesy of the Iziko SANG Collection.

Although Siebert’s collages were made more than a decade after women students enrolled in a programme with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro at the California Institute of the Arts had produced the installations constituting Womanhouse (1972), for example, they are in fact early examples of feminist art in South Africa. While there are some occasional instances of South African women artists producing works in the 1970s which are underpinned by a consciousness of gender, it was in fact only in the 1980s that feminism began exerting any significant influence in the cultural domain. Reasons for this lateness have to do with the orientation as well as agendas of leftwing groups in South Africa. Although the National Party (which came to power in 1948 and introduced apartheid legislation) coupled racism with gender discrimination, 3 activists and political organisations that engaged in resistance against the state—notably, the African National Congress (ANC)—tended not to encompass feminism within their focus. Pointing out reasons for feminism’s uneasy status within the national liberation movement, Shireen Hassim observes that it was, on the one hand, “seen as an ideology primarily articulated by white (academic) Western women” and that its “perceived intellectual roots in the North were seen to limit its applicability to the experiences of black women in the highly exceptional circumstances of apartheid”.4 On the other hand, it was construed as divisive and, more crucially, “the association of feminism with demands for greater organizational

124  Brenda Schmahmann autonomy, for more decentralized and democratic mechanisms for agenda setting and strategic positioning, and a more nuanced view of how power relations were established and maintained” was problematical to the male-dominated leadership of the national liberation movement.5 Given such misgivings, it is unsurprising that feminist activities in the domain of art were slow to emerge. Marion Arnold’s art historical work has been groundbreaking in bringing to light some feminist practices in South Africa during the 1980s,6 and she has mapped out many of the circumstances that marginalised females, also observing how the women’s movement was slow to gain credibility in South Africa.7 There is, however, an issue which her writings do not confront directly. One might assume that the 1980s, when feminist art practices became increasingly widespread, would have also seen a focus on gender in the visual arts becoming gradually recognised as compatible with aims to challenge racial discrimination. But this was not the case. What becomes evident upon investigation is that, while feminist ideas became increasingly influential in universities, including their art departments, there was ongoing ambivalence about the value of the feminist project amongst many of a left-wing persuasion operating outside academia.8 In fact, it was only following the inclusion of feminism in the national agenda in the run-up to the first democratic election in 1994 that this contention tended to dissipate. Accounting for the introduction of a focus on gender to the visual arts, Arnold observes perceptively that, by the 1980s, “postmodernism offered South African art ways of theorizing complexity, contradiction and ambiguity, of utilizing intertextuality and re-reading history”.9 I reveal in this article that such devices allowed local artists to explore ideas and concepts raised by feminists in the West in relation to the cultural and political particularities of a South African milieu. I would suggest, in fact, that the works resulting from such processes could be interpreted as arguments for the relevance of feminism in a context where its value was in dispute.

Feminist Works from the Early 1980s Feminist art in South Africa emerged against a backdrop of profound political turmoil. The 1980s were characterised by not only brutal and authoritarian political oppression but also increased mass resistance. Violent suppression of opposition to the state was in particular evidence on June 16, 1976, when police opened fire on Black secondary-school pupils protesting the use of Afrikaans as a language of instruction, and it would be in evidence a year later when Black Consciousness Movement leader, Steve Biko, was murdered in police custody. While popular resistance had tended to dissipate by the end of the 1970s, it was renewed in 1983. That year, the apartheid government attempted to invest its system of governance with the appearance of legitimacy through its introduction of a Tricameral Parliament, which gave Coloured and Indian groups some representation but excluded Black Africans. Rather than fending off criticism, this action inspired an increase in mass protests, which eventually led to the formation of the United Democratic Front, an alliance of progressive organisations. A State of Emergency declared on July 25, 1985 and ending on March 7, 1986, was followed by a second State of Emergency, announced on June 12, 1986, which lasted four years, until June 8, 1990. With the state allowed to prohibit meetings and the police to detain people indefinitely without disclosing their names or sites of internment, the State of Emergency periods saw an increase in deaths in detention as

Shades of Discrimination 125 well as in numbers of activists going into exile. Also during these times, there was an increase in operations on the part of Umkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the banned ANC, from various bases outside the country. Two organised public events are considered key in terms of imbuing South African art with an activist direction. The earlier of these, “The State of Art in South Africa” conference, was organised by the University of Cape Town in 1979. But, as Arnold observes, while the delegates made two important resolutions—to demand “that educational facilities be open to artists of all races”, and to “boycott all state-sponsored exhibitions until the first requirement was met”—“any direct reference to gender discrimination” was absent from the debates.10 Three years later, in July 1982, the Medu Ensemble, a collective of creative practitioners based in Gaborone in Botswana, organised a Culture and Resistance Festival. While important in fostering commitment and energy for deploying art to express resistance against apartheid, feminism as an ideology and the difficulties experienced by women, specifically, were once again not given any focus. Despite this, some works with feminist underpinnings made in the early 1980s began to achieve exposure or to exert some influence. Amongst the best known of these was a series of paintings by Penny Siopis (b. 1953), which represented various forms of confectionary set out on tables or pedestals and which created analogies between sweetmeats and the female body. Embellishments (Fig. 7.2), an example from 1982, includes little plastic ballerinas—the kind that are often used as decorations on cakes for young girls—embedded in its pigment. As I have noted previously, Embellishments evokes transgressive and ironic reference to a popular rhyme: “Sugar and spice; And all that is nice. That’s what little girls are made

Figure 7.2  Penny Siopis, Embellishments (detail), 1982, oil and plastic ballerinas on canvas, 59.1 × 79.5 in. (150 × 202 cm). Photo credit: Paul Mills. Courtesy of the Wits Art Museum.

126  Brenda Schmahmann of”. The vaginal cakes are rendered in fleshy pink and coffee hues which, “melded with allusions to white lace, suggest stained underwear, as if they were infused with the fluids of a seeping body rather than being palpable flesh”. Tendrils of icing, which entrap some of the figurines, “allude uncomfortably to flayed flesh, ripped lace as well as a snare”.11 By incorporating old dried paint from her palette into new wet surfaces, Siopis also conveyed a sense of deterioration and decay and thus alluded to bodily decrepitude.12 Following her completion of her Master of Fine Arts degree at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Siopis had spent a year in England—beginning in September 1978— studying for a postgraduate diploma at the Portsmouth Polytechnic. She began these works when she was back in South Africa, teaching at the former Technikon Natal in Durban. Simultaneously, Sue Williamson (b. 1941) had begun a series immediately related to a South African political arena. A Few South Africans, her series of 16 iconic images of women involved in the struggle against apartheid, was first exhibited in 1984. Williamson, who had studied at the Art Students League of New York and returned to South Africa in 1969, began the series in 1982, when enrolled for an Advanced Diploma in Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. Each portrait photograph (Fig. 7.3)

Figure 7.3  Sue Williamson, A Few South Africans: Winnie Mandela, 1983, photo etching and screen-print, 27.6 × 25 in. (70 × 63.5 cm). Courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town.

Shades of Discrimination 127 is set within a patterned border which includes motifs making reference to some aspect of the subject’s life and interests; the artist compiled accompanying information sheets on the women as well. Williamson also produced postcards from the works, which enabled the images to be distributed widely. Such a strategy was important in a context where, as Nicholas Dawes writes, “Images of women like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Helen Joseph, banned and placed under house arrest, hardly ever appeared in the media, and indeed were proscribed in many instances”.13 But it simultaneously drew attention to females who tended to enjoy less prominence in the liberation struggle than did their male colleagues. Williamson chose a visual language of the iconic. “By placing women centrally in the frame, I gave them the status of heroines”, she observed.14 Furthermore, by incorporating framing devices, which, while alluding to African textile designs, formally resemble the shapes of devotional altarpieces, she created an implicit reference to female saints within Christian iconography. Thus, the work, Dawes remarked, “had the dual effect of consolidating the mythic status of these women and confirming their real existence”.15 Williamson was chair of a grassroots women’s organisation, the Women’s Movement for Peace in Cape Town, and this political involvement had an immediate impact on the work. The visual discourse in A Few South Africans would seem to have enabled Williamson to make reference to the kinds of décor she witnessed in Crossroads, the informal housing settlement where she was doing much of her work. A high-density area that was the site of political violence, it was nevertheless also a space in which residents asserted their sense of “home” through the display of reproductions they liked, as well as personal items such as photographs. By inserting allusions to the aesthetic choices of people marginalised and oppressed through apartheid, and then reproducing her works in the form of postcards, Williamson was on one level insisting on the idea of art that referred to the tastes of, and was available to, people normally excluded from the domain of fine art in South Africa. On another level, her references to home décor in Crossroads facilitated engagement with feminist concepts of decoration. As Norma Broude revealed in her essay on the American feminist artist, Miriam Schapiro, being mistaken for a “decorator” has been viewed as a potential pitfall for artists working in modernist frameworks.16 For example, in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, first published in 1911, Wassily Kandinsky included the following well-known statement: “If we begin at once to break the bonds which bind us to nature, and devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and abstract form, we shall produce works which are mere decoration, which are suited to neckties and carpets”.17 But is it in fact the retention of “the bonds which bind us to nature” that secures a stylised motif the definition of an “abstraction”, allowing it to be distinguished from designs “suited to neckties and carpets”? It would seem that associations of work with male rather than female producers, and with galleries, museums, and other public spaces rather than domestic contexts, is what ultimately affords an image status—an idea that Williamson’s images implicitly critique. A coupling of feminist interests with local creative practices was at play in Marion Arnold’s artwork as well. Having moved in 1979 from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where she took up a position in what was then the Department of History of Art and Fine Art at the University of South Africa, Arnold (b. 1947) played a significant role

128  Brenda Schmahmann

Figure 7.4  Marion Arnold, Insight, 1985, watercolour, 21.4 × 29.9 in. (54.5 × 76 cm). Courtesy of the Standard Bank Collection, Johannesburg.

in introducing feminist concerns within the curriculum during the early 1980s. As in works by Williamson and Siebert, her watercolour painting entitled Insight (1985) (Fig. 7.4), a depiction of a hippo looking into a mirror, includes references to the creative practices of those marginalised by the mainstream fine art world, in this instance financially impoverished Shona-speaking women who depended on informal markets to sell their works. The hippo is a clay object made by a Zimbabwean female potter, and further allusions to “feminine” forms of domestic embellishment are invoked in the crochet work at the base of the mirror (another type of creative work commonly sold by Shona-speaking women in markets), moulded ceramic flowers around its border, and the decorative cloth on which the ceramic animal is placed. By representing these details in the form of a still life, Arnold alludes simultaneously to a Western genre that tends to be denigrated in gendered terms. A work by her from three years later, Divinely Appointed the Property of Ladies, which includes related imagery, makes ironic reference to words in which a nineteenth-century male critic had characterised still life, primarily practised by women, according to it a low status within the hierarchy of genres. The motif of the hippo looking into a mirror had dual significance. The mirror reflection draws attention to the idea of illusionism and thus emphasises Arnold’s conscious avoidance of single-point perspective in the work—that is, a mode of representation enabling a masterful and controlling gaze on the part of the artist/viewer. It also alludes to self-examination and the search for identity. As Arnold observed in a commentary published in 1988: Only the mirror permitted woman to gaze upon herself, woman seeing woman. And all the time man thought this habit was vanity. No. It was painful introspection, the only way woman had of determining what she really was. And yet the

Shades of Discrimination 129 mirror was not a friend; it was mute and answered none of the questions woman posed to it. Between the silent truth of the mirror and the verbal lies of man, where was woman to find herself?18 South African works with a feminist consciousness from the early 1980s were, almost without exception, made by White women. While this is partly to do with the uneasy status of feminism within the liberation struggle, an important additional factor was the minimal number of Black women artists. Through the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, the apartheid government prohibited Black South Africans from enrolling at its various established universities without special permission and instead designated five university colleges for people of colour. Only two of these— Fort Hare, intended for isiXhosa-speakers, and Durban-Westville, intended for students of Indian origins—offered fine art qualifications. Community arts organisations were the spaces in which the majority of Black artists received training in the 1970s and 1980s. In a paper delivered in 1990, Lize van Robbroeck observed that community arts projects tended to include considerably fewer women than men. Further, she suggested, community arts organisations sometimes absorbed hierarchies in which so-called fine art activities such as painting and printmaking were structured as more important and more financially remunerative than so-called craft activities such as weaving and ceramics, and that women tended not to participate in the former but to be dominant within the latter.19 Van Robbroeck also noted, “It is furthermore a distressing fact, and one worth investigating, that black women who complete Fine Art courses often do not continue pursuing a career as artists”. 20 Bongi Dhlomo (b. 1956), who was enrolled at the Evangelical Lutheran Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift in Natal during 1978–1979, is the significant exception to the rule in the sense that she studied printmaking rather than tapestry or ceramics and also sustained a career as an artist. Commenting how “at that time a black girl going out on a tangent and going to art school was unheard of”, she noted that nursing, teaching, and secretarial work tended to be the chosen occupations for women in her community. 21 Only 5 of 20 students enrolled in Rorke’s Drift programmes at the time were female, she recalled. Acknowledging that it was challenging to operate in a terrain where “all the artists that were spoken about were male”, Dhlomo does not, however, seem to have considered feminist ideas in her work but rather often used biblical themes when at Rorke’s Drift.22 In the early 1980s, when employed by the African Art Centre in Durban, run by the Institute of Race Relations, she began engaging with social issues such as forced removals. 23 Even when appearing within a feminist context, 24 her works tended to show the hardships faced by Black communities through the laws and actions of the apartheid state rather than raising concerns about gender inequality specifically. Dhlomo moved to Johannesburg in 1984, securing an administrative position in the FUBA Gallery and, in 1986, was invited to run the Alexandra Arts Centre. It seems that her family accepted her operating in art domains, despite this being unusual in her home community, not because they viewed her as mapping out new opportunities for women, but rather because they “were able to see where my career fitted in the liberation struggle” while also enabling “my financial upkeep and possibilities for bringing up my children and putting them through school”. 25

130  Brenda Schmahmann

A Journal, Some Exhibitions, and Two Conferences In 1983, an art journal published by the University of South Africa, De Arte, ran a “Women in Arts” edition. Its editorial, written by a male academic, Ivor Powell, was to some extent informed by the predominant thinking in activist circles that to focus on gender inequities was to compromise the unity of anti-apartheid resistance. But while arguing that, “given the political situation in this country, there is an element of false consciousness in asserting female unity over racial solidarity”, Powell did nevertheless acknowledge unequal relations of power between men and women in both Black and White communities. 26 He also suggested that there was an overriding paradox in South Africa. Observing that the visual arts in South Africa were not in fact characterised by the absence of women but, on the contrary, that White females were “a ubiquitous presence” in the history of its art as well as in art-world structures, he suggested that this indicated “not so much a recognition of female capabilities as a scorn for the arts in general”.27 But this argument obfuscated some very real power imbalances. In the early 1980s, male professors predominated in art schools even though their students were predominantly female, and those judging prestigious national art competitions were almost invariably men. Two years later, in 1985, the complexity of focusing on issues of gender in art in the framework of apartheid was also apparent when a Women’s Festival of Arts comprising 11 exhibitions was organised at various venues in Johannesburg. In contrast to Women Artists in South Africa, an historical survey of women artists held at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, also in 1985, where works included were selected by the curatorial staff, the organisers of the Women’s Festival of Arts sought to enable diversity by rejecting any formal selection process. Their efforts to arrange the event according to wholly egalitarian processes were met with multiple challenges. Lize van Robbroeck, one of the organisers, recalls wryly, “a call would go out to meet, fifteen or so women would pitch, take a decision, then the next meeting would be called, fifteen different women would pitch and overturn the previous decision”. 28 Despite these attempts at inclusivity, relatively few Black women were in fact available to participate and the organisers were all White. More successful in enabling diversity was an exhibition of work by South African women that Janet Goldner, a member of the New York-based Women’s Caucus for Art, initiated in about 1988. South African Mail, Messages from Inside: Women Artists in Resistance included about 400 postcard-sized works by participants from different backgrounds and circumstances. It was shown early in 1990 at the Joseph Stone Auditorium in Cape Town, the Johannesburg Art Foundation, and in New York at the SOHO 20 Gallery and as part of the Women’s Caucus for Art conference entitled “Shifting Power”. As with the Women’s Festival of the Arts, all submissions were exhibited. Siopis, who was one of its organisers, observed that, although the word “art” appeared in the title of the envisaged show, it was avoided in the information sheets and advertisements calling for participation. These were widely disseminated and included, for example, trade unions and newspapers with a predominantly Black readership such as the New Nation. 29 This avoidance of a high-art association was important in generating support, as was its involvement of organisations in South Africa with left-wing credentials, as well as its arrangement “within the terms of the (selective) cultural boycott”, and thus its backing by the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid.30

Shades of Discrimination 131 In the same way that focusing on fine art in a conventional sense tended to limit possibilities for Black female participation, so too did conferences on art. Differential access to education on the basis of race was exacerbated by gendered norms, and, as noted earlier, very limited numbers of Black women receiving any formal training in the visual arts, let alone at universities. Thus, when the Transvaal Branch of the South African Association of Art Historians was seeking papers for a “Women and the Visual Arts” conference to be held in March 1990, at the University of the Witwatersrand, it was unsurprising that nobody Black—let alone anybody Black and female—considered offering one. When, a year later, in early 1991, the Gender Research Group at the University of Natal organised a conference on “Women and Gender in Southern Africa”, there was once again conflict between what were argued to be dichotomous activist and academic interests. But this time there was also fallout in regard to what was deemed by a few delegates to be a racist insensitivity on the part of the largely White presenters and organising committee. In her scathing attack, Desiree Lewis suggested that the conference “became a self-glorifying monologue in which ‘black woman’ merely bolstered the ruling elite’s sense of authority—blatantly manifested in the logo on delegates’ folders: a tiny-headed, naked and burdened Other, ‘present’ only as object for scrutiny by the self-defining, theorising subject”. 31 But the logo in question—in which Durban artist, Dina Comick, depicted a San woman with her gathering stick and bag, and which she based on a San rock painting—was actually intended to be read in a way that was antithetical to how Lewis was interpreting it. Hassim, a member of the organising panel, observed, “We were pleased with the energy that she captured and with the San reference as we felt that seemed right in a conference taking place in the then-Natal, that it suggested women’s agency as deeply historical in Africa and not something dreamt up by ‘western feminism’”. 32

Feminist Art from the Late 1980s and Beyond Despite the fact that the context of apartheid made it very difficult for Black women and White women to find common cause, resulting in the kinds of implosions that happened at the “Women and Gender in Southern Africa” conference, feminism became increasingly influential in academia during the second half of the 1980s. When, in 1976, Cherryl Walker began research towards her book Women and Resistance, “there was almost total indifference to the idea of women’s studies within the academic community, and virtually no body of scholarship on women’s roles historically or on theories of gender on which to draw”. 33 Although, paradoxically, such developments coincided with increased marginalisation of women’s concerns within the overall goals of the national liberation movement, 34 a decade later, feminism had entered the curricula of many university programs, including art history and fine art courses. Employed by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 1984 until she relocated to Cape Town in 2010, Penny Siopis provided impetus and encouragement for a generation of female students at that institution to explore feminist ideas in their work. Unsurprisingly, her influence can often be discerned in the art of the postgraduates she supervised. For example, while the works of Leora

132  Brenda Schmahmann

Figure 7.5  Leora Farber, Delusions of Grandeur, 1987, oil on canvas, 48 × 63 in. (122 × 160 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Farber (b. 1964) from the 1990s onwards are distinctive and deploy tropes and media very different from those of Siopis, discourses and ideas in paintings she made in the late 1980s, when a postgraduate student, relate to those at play in the works of her supervisor. This is clear, for example, if one compares Farber’s Delusions of Grandeur (1987) (Fig. 7.5) with Siopis’s now-iconic Melancholia (1986). Farber’s Delusions of Grandeur, like Siopis’s painting, represents a luxurious interior in glaringly hot hues that seem to be suggestive of death and decay. It also includes allusions to abject bodies: the pattern of the two sofas transmutes into suggestions of veins and flesh and, in the case of the example on the left, slices of meat, while the rug between these two seats evokes entrails, mucous, and other bodily matter. And Farber, like Siopis, deploys the theatrical device of the swooped-up curtains but in such a way that these swags of cloth might potentially be read simultaneously as suspended carcasses in a butchery. Picking up on the disturbances to linear perspective and their association with a masculine controlling gaze, Farber’s Delusions of Grandeur also shares with Siopis an avoidance of atmospheric perspective. As in Melancholia, where, Colin Richards suggested, Siopis favours “a tactile, rhapsodic threading and weaving of matter” which compels the viewer “to relinquish a safe viewing distance and move up to and about the surface”, 35 in Delusions of Grandeur, Farber invites a form of looking which concentrates on detail across the surface of the work. 36 Crucially, the works of both artists have implications to do with a wider political context—far more so than Siopis’s first feminist works from the early 1980s. In

Shades of Discrimination 133 referring to vanitas imagery and to Baroque excess, their paintings seem to allude to a decaying and corrupt White regime straining under the weight of its acquisitions. Indeed, Griselda Pollock’s suggestion that Melancholia “reads as an allegory of South Africa—appearing to the white population as a place of plenty but always based on a violence which underpins and undermines it”, 37 could equally apply to Delusions of Grandeur, which couples an allusion to a luxurious interior with reference to meat, entrails and flayed flesh. Significant also in the late 1980s was the work of Helen Mmakgabo Sebidi (b. 1943). Although her earlier idyllic scenes of rural life offer little in the way of social commentary, from 1986 onwards she began representing her experiences of the urban environment and showing what she described as “the conflict between women and men, the past and the present” in such an arena. 38 Albeit that she has never termed herself “feminist”, Sebidi represents women as sources of strength and agency. For example, she explained the content of her The child’s mother holds the sharp side of the knife (1988–1989) to Arnold as follows: “I see a woman chained, pulling her tradition. In our language they always say—yours is yours. You’ve got to handle it, you’ve got to be, don’t let go … In African tradition they say it is the woman who holds the sharp side of the knife in this way and is saying—this is what I have to do, and it’s my way”.39 The shift in approach followed her enrolment for classes at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, where she studied under not only Bill Ainslie but also, perhaps more crucially, Ilona Anderson, whose own work was (and continues to be) informed by feminist understandings.40 But it was only really in the 1990s, with the overthrow of apartheid, that circumstances were created for an art world that included Black women, including those engaging with a politics of gender, in any significant numbers. The transition period between the unbanning of the ANC in 1990 and the first democratic election in 1994 was, additionally, crucial to feminism. Rather than seeing an ongoing marginalisation of women within the politics of the liberation struggle, these years saw women’s rights becoming central to the political agenda amongst those negotiating and developing the South African Constitution. Within her exploration of the many complex reasons for this shift, Shireen Hassim suggests that a move away from discourses of nationalism to those of citizenship on the part of the ANC, and, concomitantly, from the community “as an undifferentiated entity” to “the individual-in-community”, worked in favour of enabling focus on the need to ensure female agency, autonomy and rights.41 For the ANC, she observed, “women came to occupy a peculiar status as the proving ground for the extent to which the new order would be inclusive, participatory, and permeable to socially excluded groupings”.42 The upshot of such agendas, along with pressure from women activists, was a constitution that commits to ensuring gender equality. More particularly, there was a shift in which feminism, rather than being perceived as the province of privileged White women, achieved broader credibility. An emphasis on “the individual-in-community” may also have played an important role in developing a feminist art specifically. Rather than seeing art only as a weapon of the struggle, an attitude that was encouraged in the 1979 “The State of Art in South Africa” conference, and the “Culture and Resistance Festival” of 1982, the 1990s saw artists of a left wing persuasion feeling able to reflect on their own individual circumstances (including the ways in which their histories and experiences were shaped by gendered norms) without being in danger of inviting accusations

134  Brenda Schmahmann of self-indulgence. One might argue that the idea that the personal is political, the underpinning of much feminist work, acquired credibility in South African art of the 1990s that it had not really enjoyed in the 1980s. The increasing number of artists in South Africa who have worked with issues of gender since 1994 have developed areas of interest that diverge from those of the 1980s: clearly, not only social changes but also, for example, the development of digital technologies and forces of globalisation have had an impact on contemporary feminist art practices. But those operating in this area today nevertheless owe a debt to a generation of women artists who, while having to negotiate a context in which the relevance and viability of feminism was frequently contested, established the groundwork for current explorations of gender.

Acknowledgements This essay was first published in Woman’s Art Journal 36, no. 1 (2015): 27–36; here it has been slightly revised. My research is made possible through generous financial support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. Please note, however, that any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed here are my own, and the NRF accepts no liability in this regard.

Notes 1 Kim Siebert, “An Investigation into the Interrelationship Between the Formal Means of Collage and Assemblage and the Painted Surface,” (MFA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1984), 12. 2 Siebert, “An Investigation,” 178. 3 Discrimination on the grounds of gender was complicated by a politics of race, as indicated by Nazir Carrim, “Human Rights and the Construction of Identities in South African Education,” (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2006), 121. White women “did not have access to all jobs that men had access to, were not paid the same salaries as men, could not own property without the consent of men and were treated legally as ‘minors’, dependent on the income, authority and consent of a ‘white’ male presence.” Black women had still more limited rights in the sense that they “were not regarded as ‘citizens’, did not have political rights, were invisibilised through the body politic and marginalised in their exploitation within the economy”. 4 Shireen Hassim, Women’s Organisations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 29. 5 Ibid. 6 See Marion Arnold, Women and Art in South Africa (Cape Town & Johannesburg: David Philip, 1996). 7 See Arnold, “Visual Culture in Context: The Implications of Union and Liberation,” in Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa, 1910–1994, eds. Marion Arnold and Brenda Schmahmann (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1–32. 8 Ibid., 19. Arnold writes that “in some quarters” there was hostility to feminism, and she remarks that “black men were particularly hostile to feminism and vocal about ‘our culture’, by which they meant black culture”. But these comments do not make clear that hostility to feminism was within the national liberation movement. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 18–19. 11 Brenda Schmahmann, “Representing Regulation—Rendering Resistance: Female Bodies in the Art of Penny Siopis,” in Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa, 1910–1994, eds. Arnold and Schmahmann (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 200.

Shades of Discrimination 135 12 See Elizabeth Rankin, The Baby and the Bathwater: Motif, Medium and Meaning in the Work of Penny Siopis (Johannesburg: Imprimatic, 1992), n.p. 13 Nicholas Dawes, “Sue Williamson and the Trauma of History,” in Sue Williamson: Selected Work, ed. Sue Williamson (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2003), 6. 14 Quoted in Lila Komnick, “A Tribute to Powerful Women in Parliament’s Art Collection,” from July 2013 publication of In Session, 29. https://www.parliament.gov.za/ Multimedia/InSession/2013/july-august/files/assets/basic-html/page29.html. 15 Dawes, “Sue Williamson,” 6. 16 Norma Broude, “Miriam Schapiro and ‘Femmage’: Reflections on the Conflict between Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth Century Art,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, eds. Norma Broude and Mary Gerrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 314–329. 17 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 47. (Über das Geistige in der Kunst was first published in 1911.). 18 Marion Arnold, “Extracts from Diary Entries for Connections,” in Connections exhibition catalogue, 1988. Quoted by Leora Farber, “Opticality and Tactility in Selected South African Still-Life Painting,” (MFA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1992), 63. 19 Lize van Robbroeck, “Women and Community Arts” (paper presented at the Woman and the Visual Arts Conference organised by the Transvaal Branch of the South African Association of Art and Architectural Historians, Univ. of the Witwatersrand, March 23–24, 1990), 24–28. 20 Ibid., 26–27. 21 Interview with Bongi Dhlomo on December 12, 2011, Constitutional Court Oral History Project, Historical Papers Research Archive, Johannesburg, 3. http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/inventories/inv_pdfo/AG3368/AG3368-D19-001-jpeg.pdf. 22 Ibid., 4. 23 The apartheid government implemented forced removals between 1960 and 1983 to bring about segregation of races. Destroying multiracial communities, they often relocated people many miles from their places of work. 24 For example, Dhlomo’s works were reproduced in a collection of feminist texts entitled LIP (Lip Collective 1983) and included in the Women’s Festival of Arts (1985) in Johannesburg. 25 Ibid., 7. 26 Ivor Powell, “Editorial” of special issue on Women in Art, De Arte 23:3, 1983: 3. 27 Ibid., 2–3. 28 Informal conversation with Lize van Robbroeck on a social media site, September 2013. 29 Penny Siopis, “Some Thoughts on Women Representing Women” (paper presented at the Woman and the Visual Arts Conference, March 23–24, 1990), 45. 30 Ibid., 45–46. 31 Desiree Lewis, “The Politics of Feminism in South Africa,” Staffrider, Vol. 10 no. 3 (1992): 16. 32 Shireen Hassim, e-mail communication with the author on November 14, 2014. 33 Cherryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), xi. First published in 1982 by Onyx Press Ltd, London. 34 From 1983, progressive women’s organisations fell under the umbrella of the National Democratic Front. Hassim points out: “Within two years of joining the alliance with the United Democratic Front, women’s organizations shifted from being able to define goals and strategies in relation to their primary constituency of women to being auxiliaries of the United Democratic Front with the responsibility of mobilizing a ‘sector’ of the masses into the larger organization.” See Hassim, Women’s Organisations and Democracy, 13. 35 Colin Richards, “Excess as Transgression: Reducing Surface to Depth in the Still-Life Paintings of Penny Siopis” (paper presented at the Second Conference of the South African Association of Art Historians, 1986). 36 Farber, “Opticality and Tactility,” acknowledges commonalities between her works and those of Siopis, including Melancholia. 37 Griselda Pollock, “Painting, Difference and Desire in History: The Work of Penelope Siopis 1985–1994,” unpublished transcript of essay supplied to me by the artist.

136  Brenda Schmahmann 38 Jacqueline Nolte, “Narratives of Migration in the Works of Noria Mabasa and Mmakgabo Sebidi,” in Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa, 1910–1994, eds. Arnold and Schmahmann (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 182–185. 39 Arnold, Women and Art, 140. 40 Ilona Anderson (b. 1948) taught Sebidi prior to travelling to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1988. Anderson, who has lived in Boston for many years, was originally a painter and subsequently began working in embroidery and installation. 41 Hassim, Women’s Organisations and Democracy, 161. 42 Ibid., 161–162.

Part 3

Performing

8

Against the Body Interpreting Ana Mendieta Julia Bryan-Wilson

Looking at Blood In 1973, Ana Mendieta let blood seep out of her apartment building onto a sidewalk in Iowa City; she then documented the responses of passers-by to this suggestion of domestic unrest. Her film captures a range of reactions to the spilled, now-public mess: indifference, curiosity, and—in a conclusion so logical it seems almost planned—as a problem to be solved. The final images in the sequence depict a man in striped worker’s overalls and a painter’s hat emerging from a door at the staged scene of the crime to sweep the debris into a cardboard box (Fig. 8.1). While this act of careful workmanship unfolds, the other figure in the frame hurries on seemingly unawares, carrying the day’s mail. Moffitt Building Piece, an early work within Mendieta’s archive, highlights her consistent interest in the charged properties of blood, with its corporeal and metaphoric associations with birth, love, and death.1 Beyond that, this piece points to the artist’s life-long interest in the terrain of temporality, the utilisation of spaces outside of traditional art sites, the primacy of documentation, and the implication of audiences as witnesses after the fact. With this piece, Mendieta created a situation that unfolded unpredictably over time, in which the bodies she shot were visibly marked by gender, race, age, and class, even as the particular body of the hurt or wounded one that has presumably expressed these vital fluids stays unknown and unknowable. What remains is, in fact, a remains: a leftover stain, unidentifiable by any axis of difference that might be mapped onto a physical form. Yet it has become commonplace within the literature on Mendieta to say that her work is about “the body”; the very first sentence of the catalogue for her major retrospective at the Hirshhorn Gallery, entitled Earth Body (after the artist’s own description of her work as “earth body art”), states, “Art made from, with, and of the body has an immediacy and directness that is ineluctable and familiar—virtually everyone can relate to it implicitly and emphatically because the body is the most fundamental aspect of human existence”. 2 This passage, from the foreword by museum director, Ned Rifkin, summons “the body” as a fundamental, even universal (uninflected, ungendered, unraced) body; but what “body” is on display in a work like Moffitt Building Piece? It makes little sense to say of a work like this, that it is about “the body”, as if “the body” is a stable or monolithic category that transcends all difference; the bodies here are multiple and situational, put to work in diverse capacities. Was the blood the product of a children’s play accident, or the result of an aggressive adult crime? It is not even clear if the bleeding being was a human or an animal. Mendieta’s work dismantles,

140  Julia Bryan-Wilson

Figure 8.1  A na Mendieta, Moffitt Building Piece, 1973, super-8 mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, colour, silent, running time: 3:17 minutes, edition of 8 with 3 APs. GP1589.1 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

dismembers, and decomposes the integrity of a singular “body” by generating an array of corporeal forms, as well as by activating spectators whose bodies complete the circuit of viewing. For Mendieta, who immigrated from Cuba to the United States when she was 12 and was involved in a range of activist efforts regarding the intersection of race, gender, and nationality, “the body” could never be one thing; bodies were porous, fragmented, constantly reconstituting themselves. In this essay, I examine how “the body” in Mendieta’s work—especially the female body—has become a focal point of her reception both within her lifetime and posthumously, specifically as it has been recruited for various feminist theories. Her work has been controversially taken up within competing feminist ideologies, ones that have shifted dramatically over time and have been received by what Miwon Kwon calls “at least two seemingly irreconcilable ‘camps’… At the crux of this distinction is the status of the body in representation and as representation. That is, the body as a transparent signifier of identity and self versus the body as a nexus of arbitrary conventions of meaning, the body as signature or sign”.3 Which feminisms mattered for Mendieta? And which feminisms are at stake now as her legacy is being re-evaluated and reassessed in light of shifts within and around feminist politics regarding race, the environment, and the nation? Mendieta has become a lauded and widely recognised figure within feminist art histories; her work has been featured in many major exhibitions of women artists,4 and she has also come to figure prominently in twentieth-century Latin American art historical narratives, with these two ostensibly distinct spheres sometimes coming together (as when her art was included in the exhibition Latin American Women Artists 1915–1985 in 1995). Mendieta has also been written about in many important volumes on women artists and feminist art.5

Against the Body 141 Despite (or indeed because of) this curatorial and critical framing, some critics have questioned if feminist theories and politics indeed mattered much at all to Mendieta; writer and artist Luis Camnitzer has written, “Her work was often seen as a programmatic expression of feminism enhanced by a US perception of mysterious exoticism. It was therefore also seen in the context of a superficial anthropologism prevalent in art. Some of her success within these perspectives can be attributed to a misunderstanding. Her work is not programmatic. It is, much more simply and modestly, a self-portrait”.6 In Camnizter’s view, “the body” most convincingly examined by Mendieta was her body. How, then, are feminist theories relevant for understanding her work? With her ambivalent approach to figuration (and her sensationalised death), Mendieta has been made to speak for quite distinct, even competing, feminisms, especially as these feminisms articulate radically different approaches to “the body”.

Gendering Intermedia Mendieta first encountered the US feminist art movement at the University of Iowa, where she received her master’s degree in 1972 (she continued to live in Iowa until 1978, when she moved to New York City).7 Though she began her studies as a painter, she moved to the university’s Intermedia department, chaired by Hans Breder, to explore more multidisciplinary perspectives. Breder invited many visiting critics and artists to campus, including performance artist Vito Acconci and feminist conceptualist Martha Rosler. In what would be a particularly formative encounter, Mendieta met art critic Lucy Lippard in 1975, after Lippard’s guest lecture on women’s work.8 But even before her formal exposure to the rapidly expanding feminist art movement in the United States, Mendieta had been pursuing issues of identity, including the malleability of gender, physical abjection, and violence—both regarding unspecified victims, as in Moffitt Building Piece, but also directly related to violence against women. For instance, after a reported incident of violence against women on the Iowa campus, Mendieta inaugurated a series of works in which she confronted the spectacularisation of violated female bodies. In Untitled (Rape Scene), from 1973, Mendieta had herself tied herself to a table in her apartment, her lower body naked and smeared with cow’s blood in a terrifying durational event that was “discovered” by friends and fellow artists. Feminist writers have pointed out that by making herself the object of both violence and the gaze, Mendieta complicates any simplistic idea of female victimhood.9 In addition to this move of self-substitution or self-surrogacy, the piece has a distinctive collaborative aspect—she needed help to tie herself up in this fashion, and relied on—depended on—others to observe and document her in this state. In the rape pieces, Mendieta seems to be rehearsing various postures of female subjugation or submission, almost as if to exorcise them. They are extreme images of objectification, but hers is not the only body here; their production as art pieces immediately conjures up other bodies who are both explicit and implicit collaborators: those who roped her limbs together, those who photographed her, and those who viewed both the live event and, later, the documentation. A similar haunting of labouring figures occurs in other works, including Sweating Blood (1973), a short Super-8 film in which Mendieta’s head fills the screen in a tight close-up, rivulets of blood dripping down her face. An assistant used a syringe to squirt blood onto

142  Julia Bryan-Wilson Mendieta’s scalp before the shot; the camera was stopped periodically so that fresh blood could be applied. While Mendieta’s practice has largely been understood as solitary, the foundational interrelationality proposed by pieces such as these serves as a counter-argument to Donald Kuspit’s assertion that her work is pathologically self-absorbed, masturbatory, and narcissistic.10 Mendieta’s work proposes not a “narcissistic” attention to her own body, as Kuspit would have it, but rather a more ambivalently dialogical relationship to bodies (including those off-scene) as they form, deform, and influence each other. Kuspit’s argument flies in the face of many feminist readings of Mendieta that insist upon her performances of gendered victimhood; yet to focus only on the female body narrows our understanding of how her work functions. Untitled, Rape/Murder Series (1973) shows Mendieta outside splayed on her back, bent over a fallen log and bleeding, as if abandoned while grievously injured, or even dead. Who photographed this alarming situation? How are we rendered culpable as voyeurs? In Untitled (Rape Performance), Mendieta evinces one of her central concerns, which is the placement of a female form in the landscape, importantly located outside of an art context. The jolt of crisis that accompanies this atrocity document is escalated by the explicitly posed female body. Yet in perhaps her most well-known works, the Silueta Series, living bodies have been evacuated, leaving only outlines or suggestions of shapes. In other works of this period, Mendieta produced interruptions within public space, startling unsuspecting viewers with her evocative and grotesque creations, as in Suitcase Piece (1973), where she placed blood and animal entrails in an open suitcase and left it in an Iowa City park. As she stated in a lecture at Alfred College, “I work in public spaces… unless it’s a very restricted kind of area, I don’t ask permission and it’s always really interesting for me to have the reaction of the people around me”.11 Instigating morbid interest if not horror, this suitcase recalls Brazilian artist Artur Barrio’s wrapped “bloody packages” left at sewage grate openings and in parks in the late 1960s. In such pieces, Mendieta prompted a range of viewer responses to violence, including (but not limited to) violence against women; it is crucial to keep in focus how the bodies at stake were sometimes partial, contingent, or otherwise unreadable. Mendieta also explored the gendered associations of facial hair in the piece that became her master’s thesis, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant) (1972) (Fig. 8.2), where she transferred her friend, Morty Sklar’s, beard onto her own face. She later wrote, “After looking at myself in a mirror, the beard became real. It did not look like a disguise. It became part of myself and not at all unnatural to my appearance”.12 In truth, the result is closer to drag than to “reality”—an exaggerated, playful artifice. She also engaged in a series of exercises distorting her appearance through wigs and make-up in Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) (1972); this piece bears a resemblance to Martha Wilson’s later photographic diptych, I make up the image of my perfection/I make up the image of my deformity (1974). (In fact, Wilson was one of the visitors to Iowa’s Intermedia program.) Significantly, Mendieta’s investigations of this type relate to projects by other women of colour thinking through the imbrication of race and gender by transforming their visages, including Adrian Piper’s nearly contemporaneous Mythic Being (1972–1975). Some years later, artist Howardena Pindell produced her video Free, White, and 21 (1980), also using make-up and multiple personae to visualise the ways in which femininity has been strongly associated with whiteness. These works resonate with Mendieta’s interest in intersectionality,

Against the Body 143

Figure 8.2  Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant), 1972/1997, suite of seven colour photographs, each: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm), edition of 10 with 3 APs. GP0643.7 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the multiplicity of bodies, the unfixed qualities of identity, and the performativity of gender and race. It is crucial to our understanding of the response to Mendieta’s work that the first writings about her to appear in major publications were within decidedly feminist contexts. Two early articles, both written by Lippard, focused on Mendieta’s early work from Iowa, including the rape series, within the larger rubric of women’s role-playing, the instability of identity, and conceptualism. The first, “Transformation Art”, which was published in Ms. Magazine in 1975, discussed Mendieta’s “shocking, bloody rape ‘tableaux’” as one of many examples that included Piper, Wilson, Eleanor Antin, and others who were interrogating questions of identity within conceptual frameworks.13 As Lippard understood it, “the turn of conceptual art toward behaviorism and narrative around 1970 coincided with the entrance of more women into its ranks, and with the turn of women’s minds toward questions of identity raised by the feminist movement”.14 In “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art”, published in Art in America (1976), Lippard widens her scope to think about European artists like Marina Abramović, Gina Pane, and Ulrike Rosenbach alongside Mendieta and Piper, again as examples of what she calls

144  Julia Bryan-Wilson “the sexual and gender-oriented uses of the body in conceptual art by women artists”.15 Though Mendieta is now understood as an artist who merged performance art with land art—as is signalled by her phrase “earth body art”—these articles remind us that she was initially viewed as a feminist conceptual artist, whose ephemeral medium was the transitory nature of flesh itself.

Activism, AIR, and Heresies After Mendieta moved to New York in 1978, she became involved in a number of feminist organisations, including the AIR gallery collective (in 1977, she had shown her work at AIR in an exhibition called Out of New York Invitational). It is undeniable that Mendieta was active within AIR for several years; however, the extent of her commitment to AIR’s feminist politics is still somewhat contested.16 One photo of the “women of AIR” places Mendieta in the front and just right of centre, and with her bright white blouse, open smile, and her direct eye contact, she is arguably the tokenised focal point of the image. AIR provided Mendieta with a platform to exhibit her work, as well as a crucial network of support for her artistic experimentation, and it was there that she had her first solo shows in New York. For these exhibits, she continued to make the work she is famous for, the Silueta Series, and was rapidly absorbed within a larger movement of White US feminism interested in reclaiming the historical importance of goddesses, one that was meant as a corrective to the naturalisation of patriarchal ideas of religion. But as Olga Viso has noted, Mendieta had already been exploring prehistoric art and multifaceted notions of spirituality within several ancient cultures; this interest predated her knowledge of the feminist reclamation of goddesses.17 In fact, the issue of goddesses and Mendieta would prove heated in the context of ideas about essentialism and fraught assertions of “innate” correspondences between female bodies and nature.18 Briefly, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mendieta was viewed at as one of many female artists seriously grappling with this subject. Her work appeared in the feminist publication Heresies in their 1978 special issue on “The Great Goddess” in Gloria Feman Orenstein’s “The Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women”.19 Orenstein writes of Mendieta’s Silueto de Laberinto (1974), “In this piece someone traced her silhouette on the ground….Her image was imprinted upon the earth, suggesting that through a merging with the Goddess spirits are evoked that infuse the body and cause such occurrences as out-of-body journeys or astral travel”. Orentstein elides the collaborative aspect of her work—“someone traced her silhouette”—and places Mendieta in a homogenising context in which all “Goddess spirits” are more or less equivalent, collapsing the cultural specificities and historical differences that Mendieta was keen to emphasise. Mendieta’s relationship to goddesses was complex and volatile; she became resistant to having her work seen as another iteration of a trendy subtopic that became increasingly suffocating and rigid. She even drastically modified the aesthetics of her Silueta Series to move them away from goddess associations, removing the arms from her torsos to make them into more open-ended forms (Fig. 8.3). As she stated, The reason why I had the hands up was because it was like… a way of going into the earth. It didn’t have any other kind of connotation but what I found happened was that some critics started writing about my work very specifically, in terms

Against the Body 145

Figure 8.3  A na Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, from Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973–1977, 1976/1991, colour photograph, 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm), edition of 20 with 4 APs. GP0420-2.18 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

of the Great Goddess, and I didn’t want my work to be looked at in such a very specific kind of way. I want my work to be open because it’s made in that kind of spirit. So later on I got rid of the arm. 20 In fact, Mendieta always emphasised that she worked with “real specific earth” rather than a generic idea of “earth”; likewise, Mendieta was interested in specific goddesses not “the Goddess”. 21 She fought hard to have her careful research into particular geographical contexts made legible rather than subsumed under the larger totalising rubric of undifferentiated “Goddess spirits”, as in her AIR exhibition Esculturas Rupestres/Rupestrian Sculptures, in which the gallery notes state: “The works in this exhibition are named for goddesses from the Taino Culture indigenous to the Caribbean” (Fig. 8.4). Jane Blocker describes how Mendieta differed from some of her contemporaries like Mary Beth Edelson, writing that when feminist critics “appropriate Mendieta to a white goddess model and dis-locate her understanding of the earth from its origins in specific Cuban cultural traditions. It is difficult not to

146  Julia Bryan-Wilson

Figure 8.4  A na Mendieta, Guabancex (Esculturas Rupestres) [Goddess of the Wind (Rupestrian Sculptures)], 1981 (exhibition copy), black and white photograph, 41 × 53.5 in. (104.1 × 135.9 cm), mounted: 41 × 53.5 × 2 in. (104.1 × 135.9 × 5.1 cm). GL918 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

read this dis-location as a ‘whitening’ of the image of the earth goddess, as a way of purifying it of its roots in African and indigenous cultures”.22 Mendieta resisted being subsumed within a White feminist agenda that insisted upon the cross-historical and cross-cultural singularity of “the goddess” or “the female body”, instead grounding herself more insistently in specific contexts and traditions, and widening the spectrum of both goddesses and bodies. Mendieta struggled to define herself and her work within the sexism and racism of the art world during the 1970s and 1980s. She was part of an AIR task force on “discrimination against women and minority artists” and became an active and vocal advocate for Cuban artists both male and female. 23 During this time, she participated in a wide number of New York art events dedicated to thinking about feminist art and was on the editorial collective for the Heresies special issue on feminism and ecology, called Earthkeeping/Earthshaking. 24 Within its pages appears Mendieta’s project La Venus Negra (The Black Venus); works such as these have inflected recent readings of Mendieta as an eco-feminist, a reading that was only preliminarily beginning to circulate in her lifetime. 25 As she immersed herself in activist circles, Mendieta became dissatisfied with the AIR collective and sought connections elsewhere, including within the Cuban exile

Against the Body 147 community and within Third World feminist organisations. Though the Heresies collective had published an issue on Third World women, Mendieta realised how deeply ingrained racism was within White US feminism. In this she was not alone; panellists at the Soho 20 Gallery in 1978 participating in “Third World Women Artists”—including Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Tomei Arai—discussed how “individual encounters with the feminist movement had been keenly disappointing. Most of them had found white feminists incapable of comprehending the peculiar plight of non-white women—either because they were partners in the oppression or because they were too preoccupied with their own priorities to deal meaningfully with those of others”.26 Mendieta began to disidentify with the feminism practiced by the White majority of members in AIR; in her curatorial introduction to an exhibition called The Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, she wrote, “American feminism as it stands is basically a white middle class movement. This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more toward a personal will to continue being ‘other’”. 27 Mendieta’s identification as a “Third World woman” is related to a much wider move for women of colour in the United States to self-organise around this phrase. 28 Black women were among the first in the United States to articulate this feminism; the Combahee River Collective began meeting in 1974 and issued “A Black Feminist Statement” in 1977, later anthologised in the widely read book, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave (1982). 29 Another influential text, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, was published in 1981; it features an entire section dedicated to “racism in the white women’s movement”, as well as one on “the Third World Woman Writer”.30 The cover of the first edition of This Bridge features the schematic outline of a woman’s body on all fours, and, though she is on her knees, she is clearly in motion, unburdened by any literal weight. Just at the time of this flurry of activity, in 1982, Mendieta resigned from AIR; she gave no reason in her official letter, instead letting her dissatisfaction and anger resonate between the lines.

Mendieta’s Feminist Receptions Mendieta’s reception has been indelibly marked by her shocking death in 1985, and the uncertain circumstances that led to it, including the trial and acquittal of her husband, the artist Carl Andre. Their relationship took on a lurid cast that has been called a “Modernist martyrdom built on a foundation of Romantic myth”. 31 During the trial and its immediate aftermath, Mendieta was reduced to the status of victim, heroine, or both.32 A tell-all account, Naked by the Window (1990), by journalist Robert Katz, as well as a recent feminist graphic novel, Who Is Ana Mendieta? (2011), by Christine Redfern and Caro Caron, have circulated her biography to popular audiences.33 Beyond how her death has retroactively shaped our understanding of her life, Mendieta’s work has undergone many shifting interpretations. One historiographic tale is that in the 1970s and early 1980s, she was understood as part of a larger essentialist feminist discourse, but this reading shifted, along with the emergence of postmodern theories, to focus on her transgressing artistic boundaries and her status as an exile; the basic contours of these methodological divides and artistic

148  Julia Bryan-Wilson movements are carefully laid out by Gill Perry. 34 Though the conflict of “bad” or regressive 1970s essentialism versus “good” or progressive 1980–1990s antiessentialism is often reduced to a false binary, there have been major divisions between these conflicting ideologies.35 Mendieta died just as the tensions between the two were coming to a head.36 By the late 1980s, rather than dismissing Mendieta for her goddess titles and use of female forms, feminists became more interested in challenging presumptions of Mendieta’s “essentialism”, emphasising instead qualities such as “impermanence, distance, vulnerability and remoteness”. These later words are from a piece from 1988 by Mira Schor, who wrote that Mendieta was easily “criticised by contemporary feminist writers”.37 More recent feminist authors have stridently defended Mendieta against charges of essentialism. Irit Rogoff writes, with some distaste, “Lest all of this sound like an attempt at an archetypal ‘feminine’ artistic practice, I hasten to say that Mendieta’s work cannot be summed up as a representation of the dreaded biologically essentialist ‘feminine’”.38 Anne Raine states, “I want to think of her work as inscribing not female or ‘natural’ essences, but a gendered physicality, memory, desire and representation, across a concrete material terrain always already marked by politics and history”.39 To avoid branding Mendieta with loaded words like “nature” or “biology”, recent feminist authors use terms like alterity and fugitivity (Magdelena Maíz-Peña); exile and performativity (Jane Blocker); seriality and mimesis (Susan Best); trace and index (Joanna S. Walker); or “spatialising and geographising gendered sites” (Rogoff).40 In broad strokes, writers have turned to a few key themes that are consonant with poststructuralist feminism: Mendieta’s persistent evacuation of the female body, the iterability and repetition within her practice, and the levels of mediation introduced by her use of the document.41 Some art historians take a more dialectical approach; Miwon Kwon for instance, writes that “especially the well-known projects from the 1970s, such as the Silueta Series, Fetish series, and Rupestrian Sculptures series, veer strongly toward the essentialist pole in both intention in and reception”, yet at the same time, acknowledges that Mendieta’s works exceed those readings with their emphasis on enigma and absence.42 There have also been attempts to remove Mendieta from feminism altogether, as when Camnizter calls her work a self-portrait. Charles Merewether states, “The question of naming has afflicted the scholarship and reception of Mendieta’s work insofar as by naming it as Afro-Cuban, Mexican, even feminist, her work has been marginalised as peripheral to Modernism”, instead of being understood as central to Modernism.43 Merewether misapprehends how feminisms, far from marginal or limited, have been pivotal in shaping contemporary artistic practice and discourse. But what are we to make of Mendieta’s resignation from AIR and reluctance to call herself a feminist? The current plurality of feminist thought has produced reflections on Mendieta’s rejection of White feminism as constituting in itself a politic that might have grown with the times; as Esther Alder writes, “In distancing herself from a feminist context, she was reacting to an increasingly simplified reading of her work. Feminist thought today, having evolved to embrace a broader and more complex range of cultural practices and experience, is a field that Mendieta would have perhaps found more accommodating”.44 In fact, the feminism that mattered the most to Mendieta—Third World feminism— had concerns quite distinct from the “essentialism” and anti-essentialism debate, though its theorists and thinkers were for a long time largely absent from the Mendieta

Against the Body 149 literature. This is a feminism that is powerfully committed to intersectionality; a feminism that views anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-sexism as interwoven; one that addresses questions of economic exploitation, access to health care, homophobia, poverty, workplace organising, immigrant justice, environmental racism, the feminisation of labour, overconsumption, intimacy, cultural obliteration, and decolonisation. This is a feminism that sees spirituality as a political issue, that is unafraid to use the word “faith”. As Cherríe Moraga writes in the preface to This Bridge Called My Back, “I am not talking here about some lazy faith, where we resign ourselves to the tragic splittings in our lives with an upward turn of the hands or a vicious beating of our breasts. I am talking about believing that we have the power to actually transform our experience, change our lives, save our lives… It is the faith of activists I am talking about”.45 It is fitting, then, that the newly reissued version of This Bridge features a work by none other than Mendieta—Rastras Corporales (Body Tracks)—on its cover.

Coda: Afterlives As Mendieta’s work is taken up in different contexts over time, it is inflected by contemporaneous feminist theories and activities. Her work is seen not only within catalogue exhibitions and art history journals, but in the many homages, artistic and otherwise, that have kept her memory alive. In 1992, members of the Women’s Action Coalition staged a protest on the occasion of the opening of the Guggenheim SoHo, whose inaugural show featured four men, one of them Carl Andre. Their posters asked “Where is Ana Mendieta?” This was a highly publicised reassertion of how the artist has become, postmortem, a feminist icon; indeed, this demonstration provides the opening (and title) for Blocker’s monographic book. In a separate action, Cuban filmmaker Ela Troyano and Raquelín Mendieta, the artist’s sister, placed photos of Mendieta’s face on top of Andre’s flat metal works: a moving evocation of loss and grief. For Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco, Mendieta’s multifaceted exilic poetics are somewhat eclipsed by a focus on her death, as the artist threatens to be reduced to “a contemporary New York version of Frida Kahlo”.46 In Fusco’s words, “scores of (mostly white) feminist artists have claimed affinities to Ana, and have invoked her name as a metaphor for female victimization”, a reduction smacking of lightly veiled racist opportunism. Fusco states, “There are more than a few of Ana’s colleagues who, remembering her struggles to gain recognition…find the current appropriation of her image painful and even exploitative”.47 One year after the Guggenheim protest, Nancy Spero (one of Mendieta’s AIR colleagues) performed her Homage to Ana Mendieta at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, a recreation of a piece by Mendieta that Spero had first performed in 1991 in a spontaneous act of commemoration.48 Cuban artist Tania Bruguera produced a series of reconstructions of Mendieta’s work in her 11-year-long Homenaje a Ana Mendieta (1985– 1996); she undertook considerable archival research in preparation for these actions that were both a complex relocation of Mendieta back to the Cuban art context, and a personal incorporation of her influence.49 Other artists have produced more allusive tributes. Regina José Galindo, an artist from Guatemala who has used her own body to think through cultural memory, state violence, and crimes against women, sat in a public square under a device that dripped blood down her face, for a work called The Weight of Blood (2004) that recalls Mendieta’s Sweating Blood (1973).

150  Julia Bryan-Wilson These diverse echoes of Mendieta remind us, beyond the tired debate about essentialism versus anti-essentialism, that her work remains powerfully current. Mendieta was dissatisfied with being reduced to one vision of feminism, or one articulation of identity; her work, likewise, resists any single template. Though she is a vital presence in the global contemporary art world, Cuban writer José Quiroga acknowledges how Mendieta’s work also strategically calls to mind disappearance and the difficulty of remembering: “the pieces… incorporate feminism, anti-colonialism, earth art and the autobiography of exile. This makes the sculptures very specific but also allows them to cross over into distinct territories negotiated by the images themselves”. 50 Mendieta was deeply concerned with bodies, with their flesh and bones and fluids. Her work maintained some tether to the realm of representation, even as in its later years, in works such as Árbol de La Vida (1982) and Furrows (1984), it became more abstract. Here, the curved outlines have become disarticulated from any clear corporeality, rejecting self-containment. Furrows in particular, with its ripples emerging from the grass, is barely recognisable as a coherent or closed figure. Radically simplified and structured around pre-existing elements, these works gesture out of themselves; they extend into space. Both are organised around a strong vertical line—the trunk of a tree and a footpath—that reads less as a spine than an indication that the form continues beyond the shape she has created (Fig. 8.5). These pieces do not refuse to be gendered, but they refuse only being gendered. One could say that in such work

Figure 8.5  A na Mendieta, Furrows, 1984, suite of five colour photographs, each: 8 × 10 in. (20.5 × 25.5 cm), GL4243© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Against the Body 151 Mendieta moved contra el cuerpo—against the body—in the sense that a counterattack is a redoubling of effort, and a counter-proposition does not negate the original but seeks to answer it. Just as there is no such thing as “the earth” or “the goddess”, there is no such thing as “the body” in Mendieta’s work; she goes against “the body” to reassert the existence of, and interdependency between, many bodies.

Acknowledgement This essay was first published in in Ana Mendieta: Traces, Hayward Gallery, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, London, 2013; here it has been slightly revised.

Notes 1 Mendieta’s early work is catalogued in Olga Viso, Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2008). Since my essay was first published in 2013, an important monograph has reconsidered the range of Mendieta’s practice and resonates with many of my arguments; Genevieve Hyacinthe, Radical Virtuosity: Ana Mendieta and the Black Atlantic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019). 2 Ned Rifkin, forward, Ana Mendieta Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance 1972– 1985, curated by Olga Viso (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2004), 11. 3 Miwon Kwon, “Bloody Valentines: Afterimages by Ana Mendieta,” in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, ed. M. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 165–166. 4 Such exhibits include the following touchstones: Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move Into the Mainstream (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1989); FémininMasculin: Le Sexe de l’art (Centres Georges Pompidou, 1995); Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of, and from the Feminine (Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996); Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (curated by Amelia Jones at the Hammer Museum, 1996); and WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (organized by Connie Butler for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007). 5 For example, Whitney Chadwick’s textbook Women, Art and Society (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1990), Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard’s anthology The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994), and the Museum of Modern Art’s massive tome Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, eds. Connie Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2010). 6 Luis Camnizter, New Art of Cuba (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), 93. Camnizter was a close friend of Mendieta’s and dedicated this book to her. 7 See Julia Herzberg, “Ana Mendieta’s Iowa Years, 1970–1980,” in Viso, Earth Body (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2004), 136–179. 8 Lippard, “Who is Ana Mendieta? Nobody Else,” in Who Is Ana Mendieta?, eds. Christine Redfern and Caro Caron (New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2011), 6; see also Viso, Earth Body, 46. 9 Kaira M. Cabañas, “Ana Mendieta: ‘Pain of Cuba, Body I Am’” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 20 (Spring-Summer 1999): 12–17. 10 Donald Kuspit, “Ana Mendieta, Autonomous Body,” in Ana Mendieta, ed. Gloria Moure (Santiago de Compostela: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, 1996), 35–82. 11 Mendieta, transcription of slide lecture at Alfred University, 1981, from the Mendieta archive. 12 Mendieta, MA thesis statement (Iowa City, CA: University of Iowa, 1972). 13 Lippard, “Transformation Art,” Ms., Vol. 4 no. 5 (October 1975), reprinted as “Making Up: Role-Playing and Transformation in Women’s Art,” in Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (New York, NY: New Press, 1995), 89–98.

152  Julia Bryan-Wilson 14 Lippard, “Transformation Art,” 91. 15 Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art,” Art in America, Vol. 64 no. 3 (May–June 1976): 73–81; reprinted in The Pink Glass Swan, 99–116. 16 Raquelín Mendieta states that she joined AIR primarily because she failed to find commercial gallery representation in New York; communication with the author, July 2013. 17 Viso, Earth Body, 45. 18 Jennie Klein has delved into this complex issue with more detail than can be accommodated here; see her “Goddess: Feminist Art and Spirituality in the 1970s,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 35 no. 3 (Fall 2009): 575–602. 19 Gloria Fenem Orenstein, “The Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women,” Heresies: Great Goddess, no. 5 (1978): 74–84. 20 Mendieta, transcript of slide lecture at Alfred University, 1981, from the Mendieta archive. 21 Mendieta, interview with Joan Marter, Feb. 1, 1985, from the Mendieta archive. 22 Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, Exile (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19. The goddesses that Mendieta referenced were not at all uniformly Cuban, or Latin American, or African, or indigenous, as she explicitly drew on Etruscan and early Roman references as well. We must be attentive to her wide-ranging curiosity and not force onto her simplistic presumptions of her “Latin American” content, for that impulse has its own essentialising undertones. 23 Laura Roulet, “Ana Mendieta as a Cultural Connector with Cuba,” American Art, Vol. 26 no. 2 (Summer 2012): 21–27. 24 Heresies, Vol. 4 no. 1, issue 13 (1981). 25 See, for instance, the reproduction of a piece by Mendieta on the cover of environmental studies scholar and feminist theorist Stacy Alaimo’s book Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 26 Quoted in a write-up by Lowery Stokes Sims in Women Artists News, Vol. 4 no. 6 (December 1978); reprinted in Munity and the Mainstream: Talk that Changed Art, 1975–1990, ed. Judy Seigel (New York, NY: Middlemarch Arts Press, 1982), 105. 27 Quoted in Viso, Earth Body, 73. 28 Within the art world, Michele Wallace was a major figure within black feminism; her article “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood” was published in the Village Voice (July 28, 1975); reprinted in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal; An African American Anthology, eds. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (New York, NY: Bowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 520–523. 29 The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977), in All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, eds. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1982), 13–22. 30 This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981). 31 Joanna Frueh, “Making a Mess: Women’s Bane, Women’s Pleasure,” in Women Artists and Modernism, ed. Katy Deepwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 147. 32 As Irit Rogoff notes of the trial, “Her Feminist Activism, Her Co-Founding of ‘Heresies,’ Her Third World Politics, the Constant Contact with Cuba, her Promotion of Cuban Artist in the United States, None of These Were Mentioned,” in Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 133. (To be clear: Mendieta was not a cofounder of Heresies, but, as mentioned above, was on its editorial collective for one issue.) 33 Robert Katz, Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta (New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990); Redfern and Caron, Who is Ana Mendieta, 2011. 34 Gill Perry, “The Expanding Field: Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series,” in Frameworks for Modern Art, ed. Jason Gaiger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Open University 2003), 153–205.

Against the Body 153 35 See Helen Molesworth, “Cleaning Up in the 1970s: The Work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” in Rewriting Conceptual Art, eds. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 107–122. 36 Directly addressing this conflict, Mira Schor wrote about a panel at the New Museum of Contemporary Art held in December 1987 called “The Great Goddess Debate—Spirituality vs. Social Practice in Recent Feminist Art”; Schor, “Backlash and Appropriation,” in Broude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art, 254. 37 Mira Schor, “Ana Mendieta,” first published in Sulfur 22 (1988), republished in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 66. 38 Rogoff, Terra Infirma, 175. 39 Anne Raine, “Embodied Geographies: Subjectivity and Materiality in the Work of Ana Mendieta,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 228–249. 40 Magdelena Maíz-Peña, “Body Tracks: dis/locaciones, corporeida y estética fílmica de Ana Mendieta,” Letras Femininas, Vol. 33 no. 1 (Summer 2007): 175–192; Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?; Susan Best, “The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta,” Art History, Vol. 30 no. 1 (February 2007): 57–82; Joanne S. Walker, “The Body is Present Even if in Disguise: Tracing the Trace in the Artwork of Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta,” Tate Papers, no. 11 (April 2009); Rogoff, Terra Infirma. 41 Some authors have gone back and focused on her early student work to rescue her from charges of essentialism; see Kelly Baum, “Shapely Shapelessness: Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints: Face), 1972,” in More than One: Photographs in Sequence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Art Museum, 2008), 80–93. 42 Kwon, “Bloody Valentines,” 167. 43 Charles Merewether, “From Inscription to Dissolution: An Essay on Expenditure in the Work of Ana Mendieta,” in Ana Mendieta, ed. Gloria Moure, 148, f. 12. 44 Esther Adler, “Ana Mendieta,” in Modern Women, 391. 45 Moraga, “Preface,” This Bridge, xviii. 46 Coco Fusco, “Traces of Ana Mendieta: 1988–1993,” in English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York City, NY: New Press, 1995), 125. 47 Fusco, 125. 48 For more on Spero’s reperformance, see Walker, “The Body is Present.” 49 Gerardo Mosquera, “Cuba in Tania Bruguera’s Work: The Body is the Social Body,” Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary (Milan, Italy: Charta, 2009), 23–35; and Mosquera, ‘Resucitando a Ana Mendieta,’ Poliéster, Vol. 4 no. 11 (Winter 1995): 52–55. 50 José Quirago, “Still Searching for Ana Mendieta,” Cuban Palimpsests (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 189.

9

Jung Kang-Ja A Pioneer of Korean Experimental Art of the 1960s and 1970s Phil Lee

The feminist movement in Korean art is widely considered to have begun in the mid-1980s, when female artists affiliated with the Minjung or People’s Art movement began actively working to improve the status and human rights of lower-class women. However, the women’s liberation movement in Korea first became active in the 1920s around the “New Women’s Movement”, which arose among an educated class influenced by Western culture.1 The “new woman” of the 1920s, as put forward in pioneering descriptions in the work of female writers, rejected Confucian values and patriarchal structures, and advocated equal status between the sexes and free love. Given this history, positioning the beginnings of feminist art in Korean in the 1980s problematically leaves a 60-year gap between the two movements. Within this gap, or in what might be described as the prehistory of Korean feminist art, two women artists, Na Hye-Seok (1896–1948) and Jung Kang-Ja (1942–2017), are notable for their fierce advocacy of women’s rights. Celebrated as the first feminist artist of twentieth-century Korea, Na participated in the New Women’s Movement as a professional painter and writer. Jung is known as one of the most radical woman artists of the 1960s. A pioneer of Korean Experimental Art, who collaborated with a group of male avant-garde artists, including Jung Chan-Seung, Kang Kuk-Jin, and Kim Ku-Lim, Jung, uncharacteristically for women artists of the time, created formally daring work in a number of media, including installations, happenings, performance, body art, and film. One of the leaders of The New Woman’s Movement, Na published poems, manifestos, essays, novels, and short stories that advocated for the equality of Korean women and men. For example, after divorcing in 1931, she published “Confession of My Divorce”, in which she criticised the patriarchal practice of chastity in Korea. Her work critiques the ways in which the identity and social status of Korean women were defined by their fathers, husbands, and sons—subjugated to their fathers in childhood, their husbands in marriage, and their sons in widowhood. Na’s opposition to Korea’s male-centric marital institutions alienated her from her family and children. Shunned by her family and Korean society, she lived in solitude and suffered an untimely, tragic death. Despite the fact that Na’s early articulation and embodiment of radical ideas of feminism was ahead of its time, the position of her life and work in the history of Korean art has been more lately assured through the work of scholars and curators in the art world. 2 Jung Kang-Ja, in her restless search for new forms of artistic expression, began challenging gender inequality in the 1960s. Although she did not describe herself or her work in terms of “feminism”, Jung used her body to critically engage with, and

Jung Kang-Ja 155 explicitly transgress, the gender and sexual politics and norms of her time. Her use of the female body as a means of radical artistic expression ran against dominant narratives of South Korean society, most particularly Confucian female gender roles and authoritarian male-centrism. Jung’s exploration of experimental forms, including installations, happenings, performance, body art, and films, was ahead of its time and unprecedented for Korean women artists.3 She became notorious for her body art in Transparent Balloons and Nude (1968) (Fig. 9.1), the first semi-nude happening in conservative South Korean society, and led the historic happening Murder at the Han Riverside (1968), and the broader cultural activist happening Funeral Ceremony of the Established Art and Culture (1970), which symbolically murdered and buried the outmoded cultural establishment. She also participated in the first Korean experimental film, The Meaning of One Twenty-fourth of a Second (1969–1970), which examined the existential condition of a rapidly industrialised Korean society. These entail some of the most important Korean Experimental Art events of the late 1960s. Although Jung’s work played a leading role in the development of experimental art in South Korea, her role has been scarcely acknowledged until recently, although the contributions of her male colleagues’ have been widely recognised. Kim Jong-Mock, a reporter who published a series of articles on Jung’s contemporary, Kim Ku-Lim,

Figure 9.1  T he Shinjeon Group, Transparent Balloons and Nude, performance May 30, 1968, performance, balloons, music of John Cage, 7:14 minutes. Image provided by Arario Gallery. Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery.

156  Phil Lee stated that, while researching Kim, it was hard to find any articles on Jung’s work, and that he was only able to find Jung’s name mentioned in relation to male artists’ works.4 Jung herself has challenged this marginalisation, stating in many interviews that she actively participated in planning and carrying out historic happenings, 5 but her leading role as an organiser of these events has been rarely cited.6 Rather, she has been generally described as a passive participant who performed roles assigned to her by her male colleagues. In a 2014 interview, Jung proudly stated that some people consider her to be the second feminist artist of Korea after the New Woman, Na Hye-Suk.7 Jung’s importance in the history of Korean modern art seemed to be on the verge of being finally recognised with her inclusion in the 2016 Busan Biennale, which featured her work in the an/other avant-garde: China-Japan-Korea exhibition,8 but her untimely death in 2017 forestalled widespread recognition of her work’s historic significance. This essay reappraises Jung’s role as a key player in the development of experimental, anti-establishment performance art in Korea, and as a pioneer in bringing gender politics to the centre of her practice, by examining her radical artistic activities in the context of the Korean art world of the 1960s and 1970s.

Kiss Me: The Appropriation of Sex Symbols Jung Kang-Ja was a central figure within the Young Artists Union, a group that collectively resisted established artists and opposed existing institutions. The Young Artists Union was a collaboration between three groups of emerging artists: Moo (1962–1967), Origin (1963–present), and Shinjeon (1967–1973/1974). Members of the group were mostly emerging artists who graduated from the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University around the mid-1960s. Moo focused on the use of objects,9 Origin on geometric abstraction,10 and Shinjeon on installations, happenings and performances.11 Jung Kang-Ja, along with several other artists who graduated from College of Fine Arts at Hongik University in the mid-1960s, was a founding member of Shinjeon. Established in 1967, Shinjeon, which means “the new exhibition”, focused on happenings, performance, and installation.12 As a member of Shinjeon, Jung was one of the organisers of The Young Artists Union Exhibition13 at 123 Gallery of the Central Public Information Centre in Deoksu Palace in Seoul from December 11–16, 1967.14 Four female artists, Kim Young-Ja, Shin Ki-Ok, Shim Sun-Hee, and Jung Kang-Ja, were included among seventeen participants in the exhibition, which is where the first known happening in Korea, The Happening with a Vinyl Umbrella and Candles, took place on December 14, at 4:30 p.m. Based on a script written by critic Oh Kwang-Soo, Kim Young-Ja sat on a chair with a plastic umbrella as members hovered around her with candle lights, singing a song called “Bird, Bird, Blue Bird”, and finally breaking the umbrella. The umbrella symbolised the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima, and the candles represented the pure human spirit.15 In 1963, after the 5·16 Military Revolution, the Third Republic laid the foundations for the rapid industrialisation of the nation under Park Jung-Hee’s leadership.16 President Park aggressively pushed his agenda of industrialisation and nation-building, which caused social conflicts and tensions between the government and the people. Citizens began to yearn for democratisation, which gave rise to student movements throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. The experimental spirit of the Young Artists Union was part of this broader movement for social and cultural transformation.

Jung Kang-Ja 157

Figure 9.2  Jung Kang-Ja and members of the Shinjeon Group, Kiss Me, 1967, plaster, paint, wood, rubber gloves, sunglasses, light bulb, mask. Image provided by Arario Gallery. Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery.

Their aim was to develop new visual languages to reflect the rapid political and social changes underway in South Korea. Moreover, they struggled against conventions and societal norms by extending the scope of artistic practice to intervene on a broader cultural level. To announce the opening of The Young Artists Union Exhibition, for example, the group held an introductory seminar on November 15, 1967, and a street parade with signs displaying slogans on the opening day to introduce their work.17 At the exhibition, Jung garnered attention for her installation Kiss Me (1967), an assemblage of objects, including a red rubber glove, and a man’s head clenched within the oversized feminine lips of a sculpture (Fig. 9.2). In college, Jung was a student of Park Seo-Bo, who led the Art Informel movement and, later, the trend of Dansaekhwa. She chose Park, who had just returned from Paris, as her advisor with the hope that he would encourage her to explore new forms of artmaking, which, as a young professor and passionate advocate of contemporary art, Park did. Jung explored Pop Art, performance, happenings, soft sculptures, installations, and conceptual art and, in Kiss Me, a large plaster 2 × 1.2-m sculpture, she deploys some of these new forms to critique male-centrism and assert her freedom of artistic expression as a female artist. The red rubber gloves symbolised the status of the female in Korean society, whose role is entirely relegated to housework. In contrast, a woman wearing red lipstick and sunglasses, and telling men to “kiss me” is a woman who rejects the traditional gender roles assigned to women. On its own, the provocative and aggressive title “Kiss Me” challenges the conservative image of the passive woman, as the work

158  Phil Lee compels the viewer to think about gender roles.18 Another work in the exhibition, The Murderer (1967), was sensational enough to draw the attention of mass media. Light seeps through a perforated hole in a traditional Korean partition built on a cement block; on the other side is a collage of women’s legs and shoes, suggestive of an escape scene in a horror movie. Jung said that this installation represented a woman trying to escape the framework of customs and norms imposed on women.19 By 1960, about 20 women’s organisations across Korea had begun advocating to improve women’s living conditions in accordance with the policies of the National Reconstruction Project, which sought to unify and modernise postcolonial Korea by appropriating models from other democratic nations, including its former coloniser, Japan. It was not until the late 1960s, however, that the Korean women’s movement began to question the social structures that generated the discrimination of women. 20 Although Jung did not explicitly work within the context of the women’s movement, the development of her experimental and subversive practice coincided with this turning point in the Korean women’s movement in the late 1960s. At this early stage in her career, Jung’s work already demonstrates a critical engagement with the social roles imposed on women by patriarchal Korean society. Many of her works from this period, including the now-lost STOP (1968), which depicted a woman, with a huge heart icon inside her hugely enlarged buttocks, lying at an angle on a bench with a ticking clock around her chest, and the Women’s Fountain (1969) which represented women’s breasts, and highlighted other female body parts, seemed to be aimed at the hypocrisy of Korean men who legislated desire by proscribing the display of women’s bodies. Although Jung did not refer to herself as a “feminist”, her handling of images of the female body suggests, as the reporter Kim Jong-Mock points out, that “she was aware of the connotation and identity indicated by the woman’s body”. 21 At a time when women’s nudity or exposure was taboo, Jung challenged the dynamics of the conservative gender ideology and gender politics that dominated Korean society.

The Exploration of Body Art: Politics of Touch and Violence Organising and participating in the 1967 happening by the Young Artists Union exhibition seemed to galvanise members of the Shinjeon Group. At the end of Happening with a Vinyl Umbrella and Candle, as reported in a newspaper article released two days after the event, one of the performers explained the interplay between happening and audience: Happening is an aesthetic event that occurs in a collision between an accidental action and an object off the canvas and is itself an act of expression. The happening that we have done is a simple act of creation and cleaning our consciousness……Forget about the idea that you will get some association with reality in this happening. All you must do is to experience first-hand the beautiful phenomena that happened in a collision between accidental actions and objects. 22 The statement reveals the extent to which the young artists’ understanding of happenings was still grounded in traditional concepts such as “aesthetic”, “creation”, and “expression”. Korean daily newspapers had occasionally reported the happenings that were going on in the West since the mid-1960s, and artists had access to

Jung Kang-Ja 159 overseas art magazines such as Mizue, Art in America and Artfourm International from university libraries and bookstores in Myeongdong, and issues of Life and Time magazines that had drifted in from the US Military Force. 23 Jung said that it was difficult to get information about what was happening outside of Korea, that she had access to Art in America and Mizue from the library but was unable to read them. Choi Boong-Hyun was fluent in Japanese and able to get useful information about Marcel Duchamp and the use of everyday objects from Mizue. 24 Because, due to a paucity of translated material and poor foreign language skills, artists were compelled to try to decipher the intrinsic qualities of Western happenings from photographic images, they seem to have taken happenings as mostly a form of avant-garde art that challenged conventional forms of artistic expression. Yoon Jin-Sup argues that it was this very lack of information and understanding that produced Korea’s unique expression of the happening. 25 By imaginatively engaging with the visual cues provided by the illustrations they found in magazines, Yoon claims, Korean artists were able to create “a happening form without fixed form” different than the compartmented structure of Allan Kaprow, and to use the form to examine the realities of contemporary Korean society. 26 The Shinjeon Group accordingly developed its own series of happenings. Working mainly with Shinjeon co-founders Jung Chan-Seung and Kang Kuk-Jin, Jung Kang-Ja was instrumental in conceiving and staging the group’s provocative performances and happenings following Happening with a Vinyl Umbrella and Candles. In particular, the semi-nude performance Transparent Balloons and Nude, performed in the spring of 1968, in which Jung introduced a living female body into the public space of art, made her notorious. The event was planned by the Shinjeon Group, along with the 4th Contemporary Art Seminar organised by the Young Artists Union to introduce “Happening Show”.27 Jung said that it was primarily Jung Chan-Seung and herself who organised the happening. Considered Korea’s first nude performance, Transparent Balloons and Nude was held at the C’est Si Bon music café in Suhrindong, which was the centre of youth culture at the time, and widely known as a venue for young folk singers. Opened in Myungdong in 1953, C’est Si Bon became the premier cultural space for college students when it moved to Suhrindong in 1964. On the evening of May 30, 1968, about 350 audience members gathered in C’est Si Bon, where the avant-garde music of John Cage, selected by the musician Jin Ik-Sang, played under a lighting device with ten coloured lights, including blue, red, and yellow. 28 Jung Kang-Ja appeared on the stage wearing a white scarf, a white shirt, and pants. She then sat on a chair as young men cut away her shirt and pants with a razor blade, eventually exposing her breasts, leaving only her underpants intact. 29 After a group of young men blew up transparent “modern balloons”, members of the audience attached the translucent balloons to Jung’s half-naked body.30 Jung said that she had the idea of using transparent balloons instead of body paint after watching students blowing up adhesive balloons.31 After her entire body had become engulfed by the balloons, she stood up, at which point Jung Chan-Seung, Kang Kuk-Jin, and a few audience members leapt onto the stage and pressed the balloons into her body until they burst.32 Once all of the balloons were broken, Jung stood, half-naked, alone on the stage. Silence followed. Kang later recalled that the performance “was intended to discover a new phenomenon of beauty in the course of human nudity, chemistry, and light”.33 But it is hard to imagine that at least some member of the audience would

160  Phil Lee not have associated the violent actions of the male participants and the silence that followed with Korean men’s controlling possessiveness of, and fantasies around, the female body. If, as Kang has suggested, the act of tearing a woman’s clothes and covering her body with transparent balloons spoke to men’s desires and fantasies for and about women, the consequent act of bursting the balloons would have brought Jung’s male aggressors into direct contact with the body of an actual woman. The Shinjeon group had initially planned to use a model for the happening, but she dropped out over concerns about the consequences of appearing naked in public. As one of the organisers and as a woman artist, Jung stepped in for the model. While she had intended to be completely naked during the performance, the owners of C’est Si Bon asked the artists to change their plan because plainclothes police officers were sitting in the café.34 In fact, the artists’ intended impact for the piece likely pertained more to formal disruption than confronting gender inequality. Jung said that their idea was to show that “[o]ur body is better than any [art] object”, 35 and to confound artistic conventions by creating a form of temporal art that left no material remnants and that engaged the audience as a partner in its creation.36 Nevertheless, Jung’s provocative performance yields rich feminist readings: the balloons suggest the fragility of ideal beauty, while the transgressive actions of the male participants against her body and her silence evoke women as the object of male violence. Jung’s body covered with balloons can be seen as a body suspended in the framework of the older generation, smothered by contemporary social values and standards. When she finally became nude, as art historian Oh Jin-Kyung has stated, her body was freed from the social oppression as embodied by the balloons.37 Kim Mi-Kyung assessed the happening as “the first feminism project in Korea”.38 Korean tradition held the female body as an ideal object that should be neither touched nor exposed. But Jung’s performative tactics induced the audience to aggressively and sometimes violently engage with her body. Amelia Jones notes that body art “solicits rather than distances the spectator, drawing her or him into the work as an intersubjective exchange”.39 The balloons acted as an intermediate zone of resistance between Jung’s body and the men’s hands pressing against them. When the balloons burst, the contact between the men’s hands and Jung’s body became immediate, abruptly displacing a voyeuristic form of engagement with a socially proscribed direct one. Conversely, a female spectator would likely have experienced a disjunctive breach between the received idea of the objectified and passive female body at the moment of contact with Jung’s real one. In this sense, Jung’s body art employs aspects of what Peggy Phelan has called the “politics of touching and being touched, which encompasses complex politics at work in relation to live performance”.40 Though performed in 1968, when international feminist art movements were hardly known in Korea, the terms of Jung’s performance share ground with terms invoked in discourses relative to body art that were circulating elsewhere at the time. As Phelan argues, “since much of this work responds to the history of violence central to women’s lives throughout the world, it often repeats some form of violence in an attempt to master and transform it”.41 The reception of the happening at C’est Si Bon by a number of major journals and newspapers was dismissive; it was described in terms such as crazy and extreme and tended to focus mainly on the provocation constituted by Jung’s semi-nude body. An article in Chosun daily included such subtitles as “Happening Show towards an Extreme” and “Woman in Underwear Buried in Balloons”, describing in detail the manner in which

Jung Kang-Ja 161 Jung’s body was subject to the transgressive actions of the audience.42 The JoongAng daily reported that the Young Artists Union had repeatedly introduced “odd and crazy” actions called “happenings”, describing them as cultural terrorists who had replaced the canvas with a woman’s body.43 The Hankuk daily commented that the event raised the question of “whether or not it was necessary to introduce these happenings into the conservative Korean cultural climate as they emerged in the West”.44 While Jung made it clear that her body in her work was both a medium of expression and means of representation, the magazine described her as a young female artist who had made her debut with a “99% naked happening show”45 and dismissed her as “the goddess of happenings who enjoys taking off her clothes”.46 But Korean society’s shocked reaction to her work was itself persuasive that body art was an effective and direct way for her to at once activate herself as subject and draw attention to the issues that concerned her. While Jung’s interest in engaging with the social status of Korean women and oppressive Confucian ideology around women’s bodies had already manifested in work like Kiss Me, in which everyday objects worked to signify the repressive and fetishised sexual and gender dynamics prevalent in Korean society, she was able in her performance to bring her audience into dynamic relation with a woman’s real body in real space. In Transparent Balloons and Nude, Jung’s body art worked in a such a way that “the distances between artist and artwork, artist and spectator are definitely collapsed”,47 wherein the artist performs herself “as a representation”48. In contrast with the controversy, notoriety and attention that Jung garnered from Transparent Balloons and Nude, Suppressed (1968) (Fig. 9.3), an installation piece that also contested gender inequality and the restrictions placed upon women’s bodies, received scant critical attention. In this work, which featured

Figure 9.3  Jung Kang-Ja, Suppressed, 1968, cotton, iron pipe, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery.

162  Phil Lee an iron pipe placed in the middle of a large pile of cotton batting, the folded sheets of soft cotton are depressed by the pipe, a phallic symbol that could also denote violence. The materials also relate to the gender discrimination inherent in the Third Republic’s five-year economic development plan. Korean men were considered the pillar of industrialisation, while women were responsible for domestic labour and represented as objects of male sexual desire. Jung stated that she meant the work to allude to the relationship between ideologies of sexual inequality and the politics of the sex act.49 Overall, in contrast to the eagerness of many newspapers and magazines to question the motivation behind her semi-nude performance, Jung’s motivation for producing Suppressed was never interrogated by the press. At the same time that she was engaging her body to criticise the gender discrimination in Korean society, Jung had been producing installations such as Kiss Me (1967), Murderer (1967), STOP (1968), Suppressed (1968), and Women’s Fountain (1969). Only the sensational lipshaped Kiss Me attracted attention, an anomaly that attests to the unique power of body art, in which a female artist constitutes her physical self as the site of contention, to challenge and disrupt societal gender conventions. Jung believed that her body was the best material for her art—an art object in itself. “Can you imagine how free I must have been to think that I was a celibate and that my body was an object?”.50 By claiming agency and authorship over her body, Jung felt herself liberated from social conventions.

From Body to No Body The manner in which newspapers sneered at Jung after her 1968 semi-nude performance was somewhat distinct from their response to her male counterparts; male artists were simply considered to be avant-garde artists who defied conventions, or at worst, hippies, degenerates, or decadents. Jung, however, was singled out as a subject of gossip, and a marketing draw. Jung stated, “after I performed in several happenings in the nude, Korean men saw me as someone whom they could easily have fun with. Even newspaper reporters asked me to go for drinks with the implication that they were expecting to sleep with me”.51 Nevertheless, Jung maintained her role as a leading member of contemporary experimental art groups, including Shinjeon, the Young Artists Union, and The 4th Group, an interdisciplinary collaboration including members from art, theatre, fashion, music, film, media, popular art, and religious circles. 52 In Korea, performance as a social resistance movement, which attracted participants from various cultural fields, first emerged with The Eh-Juh-Tho group, which was founded in 1966 as the first underground experimental theatre movement focused on pantomime, and changed its name to The 4th Group in 1970 when it united with members from various cultural fields to pursue “total art” activities. In 1970, Jung Kang-Ja, Jung Chang-Seung, and Kang Kuk-Jin began working with The 4th Group. In that year, Jung Kang-Ja planned an ambitious solo piece called No Body (Moo-Che),53 at the Central Public Information Centre in So Gong Dong in Seoul.54 The plans for No Body included a series of events in collaboration with The 4th Group over five days from August 20 to 24, 1970: an opening party on the 20th, the seminar “Is In-corporeality Possible for Art?” on the 21st, a pantomime performance on the 22nd, a co-presentation with The 4th Group on the 23rd, and finally Jung’s No Body performance on the 24th. The opening was held on the 20th, and the

Jung Kang-Ja 163 seminar was successfully held on the second day, but the South Korean government abruptly closed the exhibition on the third day, stranding the ambitious happening From Corporeality to In-corporality and two other scheduled events. In response to the closing of the exhibition, Jung put a note on the door stating that “this exhibition was closed by government officials. As an artist, I wail bitterly with my audiences”. 55 The title No Body derived from the manifesto of The 4th Group, written by artist Bang Tae-Soo: “We liberate human beings by their very nature; We confirm the independence of pure Korean culture; We integrate all systems through participation; We become all by being nothing”. 56 The 4th Group’s artistic ideas can be summed up with the term “incorporeality”. 57 The idea of incorporeality derived from the philosopher Laozi’s political thinking, which directed adherents to abandon the desire to dominate and to rule rather in accord with nature (Fig. 9.4). In a recent interview, Jung recalled that she wanted her No Body solo performance to refute the media’s characterisation of her art as merely of vulgar interest or an offense against public morals. No Body was intended to position Jung, perhaps paradoxically,

Figure 9.4  Jung Kang-Ja, Moo-Che (No Body) exhibition poster. Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery. Image Provided by Arario Gallery.

164  Phil Lee as both subject and object of her art. The literal meaning of No Body (Moo Che) is “without substance or body”, an idea that imparts equal subjective status to humans, objects and nature, which, by extension, would also challenge the male-centric denotation of woman as object. If incorporeality implicitly acts to dissolve the boundaries between humans and nature, and subjects and objects, it can equally well serve to nullify the oppositional syntactical foundation that underlies gender discrimination. Jung’s work then might be seen to propose a body art that defeats gendered binaries in a way that distinguishes her East Asian feminist praxis from those of her contemporaries working with their bodies within different geographic, social, political, and/ or social contexts. Unfortunately, with the forced closure of the exhibition, Jung’s notions of incorporeality were never fully realised; the government’s shuttering of the exhibition was decisive in persuading her to abandon happenings and performance. Following the closure, despite her ambition to continue exploring unconventional media, Jung felt that she was no longer able to pursue her career as an avant-garde female artist in Korea. Four years later, Jung married film director, Nam Sang-Jin, and left Korea for Singapore in 1977, where she returned to painting, expressing her inner world through exotic, romantic and dreamy landscapes. Ironically, it is in a painting made after the closure of her solo exhibition, that Jung most explicitly articulates her anti-government position. Notwithstanding the radical aims of her performances and happenings, she had never before overtly expressed her position on the politics of the Korean government. Neither Shinjeon nor The 4th Group produced expressions of anti-government sentiment in ways that are historically legible; they criticised the establishment, but only in the cultural context. 58 In her painting, Demonstration against the Revitalising Reform (1973), however, Jung included banners with red letters that read: “overthrow of the dictatorship”, “withdraw the military government”, “desperately oppose the military regime”, and “end the power usurped with the gun and sword”. The title of the work and banners therein refer to the Park Jung-Hee regime. The painting depicts Korean citizens facing the police and some people in the foreground throwing stones towards policemen/soldiers. Dark-coloured tones and rough brushstrokes seem to physicalise Jung’s anger towards the government’s control of culture. Jung’s role in introducing avant-garde happenings in South Korea provoked social stigmatisation and a derisive response from the press, which characterised her as an absurd degenerate female artist who trafficked in decadence and obscenity. The reputations of her male colleagues, such artists as Jung Chan-Seung, Kang Kuk-Jin, and Kim Ku-Lim, on the other hand, were redeemed a few years after these works were staged—their places as leading avant-garde artists in the history of Korean modern and contemporary art assured, while Jung’s generative contributions are scarcely acknowledged. Though her physical absence from Korea lasted only five years, until recently, her seminal role in the history of Korean avant-garde art was almost entirely erased. After she returned to Korea from Singapore in the early 1980s, Jung had over 30 solo exhibitions that garnered scant attention until her death at the age of 75 in 2017. The reperformance of the happening, Transparent Balloons and Nude, on the occasion of the 2017 Busan Biennale, finally brought her to the attention of a broad section of the general public.59 The painting Myungdong (1973) features a topless woman majestically walking the street of Myungdong, a mecca for the young and trendy in the 1970s. With her breasts exposed, she sports a chic hat and fashionable boot-cut pants. A paintbox strapped

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Figure 9.5  Jung Kang-Ja, Myongdong, 1973, oil on canvas, 63.9 x 51.3 inches (162.2 x 130.3 cm). Courtesy of Jung Kang-Ja Estate and Arario Gallery.

over her right shoulder and a painting folder in her left hand reveal that the woman is an artist. The painting can be read as a self-portrait of Jung as a female avant-garde artist who is independent, free, adventurous, passionate, and self-confident (Fig. 9.5).

Notes 1 Discussions on the “new woman” reached its height when Kim Won-Joo announced the “New Woman’s Declaration” in 1920. Kim Won-Too, “The New Women’s Declaration,” New Woman, no. 2 (April 1920): 7. 2 In 2012, scholars in art, culture, and history gathered to establish the Na Hye-Seok Society in Suwon City, where she was born and grew up. They regularly held academic conferences, published academic journals, and set up a special exhibition hall for Na Hye-Seok at Suwon Museum of Art. 3 Most female artists of the 1960s and 1970s were generally interested in expressing the lives and inner worlds of women using figurative images and conventional media such as painting and sculpture, while only a few of them explored abstraction. 4 Kim Jong-Mock, “Jung Kang-Ja, a Resistant and Radical on the Blacklist of the 1960s, and the Protest of Anti-Yooshin,” Kyunghyang Shinmoon, February 9, 2018. https:// h2.khan.co.kr/201802091819001 (accessed July 25, 2019). 5 Jung Kang-Ja, interviewed by Suh Jung-Guhl, the Institute of Asian Culture, November 13, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vj8dhA1eLU&t=475s (accessed January 1, 2019).

166  Phil Lee 6 In a 2016 archive publication of Korean Performance Art, Jung was included as the only female artist. However, while male artists such as Kim Ku-Lim, Lee Kun-Yong, Lee Seung-Taek, Seong Nyung-Gyeong, and Lee Kang-So were described with such words as pioneers, virtuosos, and avant-gardists, Jung was introduced with the phrase, “the avant-garde art’s feminism power”. See the table of contents: Asia Culture Center, Happening and Events: Korean Performance Art of the 1960s and 1970s, (Kwangju: Asia Culture Center, 2016). This book is in the form of an oral record that transcribes interviews with the artists. “The interview of Jung Kang-Ja by Suh Jung-Guh referenced in note 5 above is transcribed and included in this book”. 7 Jung Kang-Ja interviewed by Suh Jung-Guhl. 8 The exhibition was designed to recover the forgotten and devalued avant-garde art of China, Japan, and Korea from the 1960s through the 1980s. 9 Six students who graduated in 1963 were members of the Moo, which means zero or nothing, sought an oriental state of nothing, drawing the attention of critics for their creative attitude of rejecting all restraints. The inaugural exhibition was held at the National Library Gallery from June 2 to June 8, 1962. The second exhibition was held at the Central Public Information Center from June 20, 1967, after which the group was disbanded. 10 Eight students who graduated in 1973 were members of the Origin, a group that pursued exploration of the self and embodied the creative passion for novelty during the 1960s. Their inaugural exhibition was held at the Central Public Information Center in September 1963. Geometric abstractions were mainly featured until the 10th-anniversary exhibition held at Myungdong Gallery in May 1973, but later, they went through the process of dissolution and re-integration as the group’s preference for flatness and abstraction, or image experiment, took precedence. Eventually, flatness became a feature of the 11th Origin Exhibition held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in June 1975. Especially in the late 1970s, monochromatic paintings (Dansaekhwa) became the mainstream of the group. 11 Before forming Shinjeon, the graduates of 1965, Jung Chan-Seung, Kang Kuk-Jin, and Kim In-Hwan, served as members of the Non-Gol group. Non-Gol also pursued experimental art mainly through happenings and performances but disbanded after holding two exhibitions. The group published Non-Gol Art (1965), the first contemporary Korean art magazine, which was very innovative, given the lack of publications in art of the time. Non-Gol did not seem very solid given the independence of Shinjeon by Kang Kook-Jin, Kim In-Hwan, and Jung Chan-Seung. The graduates of 1967, Shim SunHee, Yang Duck-Soo, and Jung Kang-Ja joined the founding of Shinjeon, and they later formed the Young Artists Union along with Moo and Origin. 12 “Painters as Activists,” Hongik University Newspaper (Hongdae Hakbo), December 15, 1967. 13 For more detailed descriptions about the exhibition, see Kim Mi-Kyoung, Experimental Art in Korea (Seoul: Sigong Art, 2003), 23–75. 14 The Central Public Information Center was established in Sogong-dong in 1957 as an exhibition hall under the Public Affairs Office. Later, in Sogong-dong, until 1968, the hall moved to the northeastern temporary building in Deoksu Palace. The Center lent its exhibition hall to artists for free between December 1957 and April 1972. The free rental system attracted young artists and held significant exhibitions. https://news.joins. com/article/1312686 (accessed June 5, 2020). 15 “Artistic Show Called The Happening with a Vinyl Umbrella and Candles,” KyungHyang Shinmoon, December 16, 1967. Held by Moo and Shinjeon, in this happening, Kim Young-Ja took a central role as a woman artist, but the female body was not her concern. 16 Park and his allies called the event a revolution, but its nature as a “revolution” is still controversial in South Korea. 17 Among the slogans are “artists as activists”, “against the National exhibition”, “postabstraction works”, “a country that has no Contemporary art museums”, “the development of the nation depends on active policies for the promotion of art”. 18 Art historian Oh Jin-Kyeong argues that these open lips are naturally connected to the female genital organs, and this work is similar to Niki de Saint-Phall’s Hon. She claims that it challenges the male-centred society that regards the female body as a private and secret male property by presenting it as open to the public and humorous. In particular,

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this was very scandalous expression in the Korean society of the time, that demanded absolute purity and quietness of women. See, Oh Jin-Kyeon, “Body Politics of Korean Feminist Art,” Art History Forum, Vol. 20 (2005): 85. 19 Oh Sang-Ghil, “An Interview with Jung Kang-Ja, in Rereading Korean Contemporary Art II (Seoul: ICAS, 2001), 229. 20 “What Should the Women’s Organization Take?” Seoul Shinmoon, August 30, 1960. 21 Kim Jong-Mock, “Jung Kang-Ja”, February 9, 2018. 22 “Artistic Show Called ‘Happening with a Vinyl Umbrella and Candles’”. 23 Oh Sang-Ghil, “An Interview with Jung Kang-Ja,” 232–233. 24 Jung Kang-Ja, interviewed by Suh Jung-Guhl. 25 Yoon Jin-Sup, “History and Criticism on Korean Avant-Garde Art,” Reviews on the Art History, Vol. 49 (2017): 11. 26 Ibid., 12. 27 Several members of the young artists union had held a series of lectures and seminars to establish that their work was keeping pace with contemporary international trends and to assert that Art Informel had stagnated in the Korean art world. 28 Jung Kang-Ja, interviewed by Suh Juung-Guhl. 29 The beginning part of the happening is similar to Ono Yoko’s Cut Piece (1964). They might have seen photos of Yoko’s performance, but it is hard to find statements or evidence that suggest the artists knew Yoko’s work. In an interview, Jung Chan-Seung said that he did not even know the word “happening” until journalists who knew Allan Kaprow called their work a happening. See, “Jung Chan-Seung Conversation with Keum Nu-Ri,” Report 6 (Ahn Graphics, 1991), 38. 30 “How Should We See Contemporary Painting,” Chosun Ilbo, June 2, 1968. 31 Jung Kang-Ja, interviewed by Suh Jung-Guhl. 32 Ibid. Jung said that though many media reported two other women artists Shim Sun-Hee and Kim Moon-Ja participated, they were not there. 33 See the artist’s website: http://kangkukjin.com/gallery/view_product.php?Code= happening03_0001&CatNo=&start=0&keyword=%C5%F5%B8%ED%C7%B3% BC%B1 (accessed December 20, 2019). 34 Ibid. Also see Suh Chul-In, “I Did Nude Performances 40 Years Ahead of Lady Gaga,” Monthly Chosun Magazine, June 2012. http://monthly.chosun.com/client/news/viw.asp? ctcd=F&nNewsNumb=201206100056 (accessed July 25, 2019). 35 Oh Sang-Ghil, “An Interview with Jung Kang-Ja,” 231. 36 Jung Kang-Ja, interviewed by Suh Jung-Guhl. 37 Oh Jin-Kyung, “Body Politics”, 87. 38 Kim Mi-Kyung, Experimental Art in Korea (Seoul: Sigongart, 2003), 138. 39 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 31. 40 Peggy Phelan, “The Returns of Touch: Feminist Performances 1960–1980,” in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, exh. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, California & Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 359–361. Phelan argues, “[d]ramatization of sensuous and violent epistemology of touch form one of the most consistent themes in the history of feminist art” and “since much of this work responds to the history of violence central to women’s lives throughout the world, it often repeats some form of violence in an attempt to master and transform it”. 41 Ibid., 361. 42 Chosun Ilbo, June 2, 1968. 43 “Avant-garde Art towards an Extreme, a Happening Show in Seoul,” JoonAang Ilbo, June 1, 1968. 44 “The Fusion of Lighting, Sound, and Space,” Hankook Ilbo, June 2, 1968. 45 “My ‘Nude’ is a Material for My Work,” Sunday Seoul, November 17, 1968. 46 Ibid. 47 Jones, “Introduction,” 8, also, see 252. 48 Uri McMillan, “Introduction: Performing Objects,” in Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2015), 4.

168  Phil Lee

49 50 51 52

Kim Jong-Mock. Oh Sang-Ghil, “An Interview with Jung Kang-Ja,” 231. Suh Chul-in, “Nude Performances”. Young artists’ criticism of the cultural establishment was at its height in 1970, as seen in the 25th Independence Day of the Republic of Korea. Korea was stabilising economically in the 1970s but remained politically unstable. Park Chung-Hee was re-elected in 1967 and the ruling party won the seventh parliamentary election, but a demonstration was staged around the university community to denounce the rigged process. This put pressure on 315 professors, students, and artists, as the regime’s oppression of culture had intensified. The year The 4th Group was formed, writer Kim Ji-ha was arrested for violating the AntiCommunist Law, and the magazine in which he published his writings was suspended. The 4th Group organised the happening on the street Funeral Ceremony of the Established Art and Culture to criticise conventional art and culture. On August 15th, young artists gathered in Sajik Public Park, and read aloud their decree calling for independence from the established and the existing system. Then they marched down the nearby main street of the park. Kim Ku-Lim led the procession, and he and Jung waved the Korean national flag as well as The 4th Group’s white flag, which symbolises purity, sunlight, the universe, traditional white Korean clothes, and spirituality. Behind them, Jung Chan-Seung and Son Il-Kwang carried a coffin decorated with flowers and the Korean national flag. Starting from Sajik Public Park, the march was planned to proceed to the Gwanghwamun Gate, then over the first Han River Bridge, and finally along the white sands of the riverbank, where the funeral would be performed. However, as many feared, the marchers were arrested near the Gwanghwamun Gate for the official reason of violating traffic laws, bringing the happening to an abrupt end. Though artists claimed that it was not a demonstration against the government, Jung and her colleagues were arrested and punished by summary trial. The 4th Group was forced to disband, and Kim Ku-Lim was exiled to Japan in 1973. 53 무체(Moo-Che) can be interpreted as meaning that there is no substance, shape, substance, or body. I choose “No Body” here. 54 Jung also calls the exhibition “an exhibition of painting without painting”. Jung Kang-Ja, Jung Kang-Ja (Seoul: Shodam Press, 2007), 171. 55 Kim Mi-Kyung, Experimental Art, 138. 56 “Go-Go Dance under Club Lighting in a Temple,” Sunday Seoul (June 28, 1970):12–13. 57 Ibid. 58 In the October 1968 happening, Murder at the Han Riverside, Jung Kang-Ja, Jung Chan-Seung, and Kang Kuk-Jin, dug deep holes under the second bridge of Han River. After they were done, the artists encouraged audience members to bury them into the holes and pour water over their heads. After getting out of the holes, the artists wrote critical phrases on long vinyl tabards: “cultural swindler”, “cultural blind”, “cultural shirker”, “illicit fortune maker”, “cultural peddler”, and “cultural acrobat”. Finally, they shouted each phrase and proceeded to burn the tabards. The performance was an expression of anger and despair towards the corrupted society by “burying” and “murdering” the outmoded cultural establishment. Jung said that, in particular, it was a backlash against professors who were still teaching students to imitate Impressionism or Art Informel. 59 The 2016 Busan Biennale Project 1 hosted an/other avant-garde china-japan-korea exhibition. The historic performance was re-enacted in a broad context that sheds light on the Korean avant-garde. It was held on July 21, 2016, at the alternative space Loop in Seogyo-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul. Jung Kang-Ja received media attention by being invited to the re-enactment. She said that she was not aware of happenings or feminism at that time, but performed with the passion for the new art, to challenge the old generation who educated the younger generation remnants of Japanese culture. Young artists believed that they were able to produce new creations by protesting against the establishment. For the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCwWUdZXvT0 (accessed February 20, 2020). For an article on the re-enactment, see Park Jung-Hwan, “Korea’s First Nude Performance, Transparent Balloons and Nude...Replayed in 48 years,” News1, July 21, 2016. https://www.news1.kr/articles/?2726713 (accessed February 20, 2020). In the same context, The 4th Group’s Funeral Ceremony of the Established Art and Culture was re-enacted at 2 p.m. on July 23, 2016, at Marronnier Park in Daehankro.

10 “Really African, and Really Kabuki Too” Afro-Asian Possibility in the Work of Senga Nengudi Ellen Y. Tani In Costume Study for Mesh Mirage (1977) by the artist Senga Nengudi (born as Sue Ellen Irons in 1943), a thick paper drop cloth drapes a masked figure that appears both doll-like and alien, its neck festooned with shredded die-cut vinyl (Fig. 10.1). In place of eyes, there are flaccid tubes, and the artist’s nose peeks uncannily through the crotch gusset of a pair of pantyhose. It is a material study in texture, opacity, and volume as well as a private studio performance, a “minimal experiment”, as she recalls, that she was too shy to do in front of others.1 The term “costume study” suggests a future manifestation of Mesh Mirage, but there is no such work in the artist’s oeuvre, only myriad experiments with texture, opacity, and the body that, since the 1970s, have spanned sculpture, installation, and performance. The work emblematises Nengudi’s use of costume and masking to achieve uncanny transformation, mapping an environmental condition—“mirage” being an optical illusion caused by atmospheric distortions related to light and temperature—onto the body. Mediated by the variegated surfaces of pantyhose, plastic, and paper, mirage functions here as a social metaphor for the dissonance between the perceived and the real. “At the core of all this to reflect the distortions that come about from experiencing the human condition”, she wrote at the time. “To show tension and release of that tension, change, metamorphosis, movement”. 2 Addressing the dialectic of appearance and reality within the realm of human relations, Nengudi invites us to consider the invisible systems that shape and distort that dialectic—prejudice among them.3 It is one conceptual project in a string of performance-based works that she approached, as she described, “in a somewhat traditional Afro-Asian way. The sense of ritual played an important part in what I was doing, as well as incorporating Music, Movement, Art, and Story”.4 Among these myriad points of reference, across media and culture, unfolds the quiet radicality of an artist whose pursuit of transformation and movement remains the only constant in her practice. Senga Nengudi grew up in greater Los Angeles in the 1960s, living and working between Pasadena and Watts, and attended Cal State Los Angeles. After graduating in 1966, she spent a year living with a family in Tokyo—her first time away from home—and returned to Cal State for graduate study in sculpture. At the urging of a professor, she moved to Harlem in 1971, receiving an informal education in African-American art history from her politically engaged peers before returning to Los Angeles in 1974. Tokyo and New York were immersions in Japanese culture and African-American culture, respectively, which involved feelings of estrangement and foreignness as well as excitement about new cultural connections.5 These experiences of transformation undergird Nengudi’s polycultural, interdisciplinary art practice

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Figure 10.1  S enga Nengudi, Costume Study for Mesh Mirage, 1977. Photo credit: Adam Avila. Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Lévy Gorvy, New York and London; Sprüth Magers.

in her syncretic approach to concept, form, and intent. As an African-American woman, her experiences were shaped by structures of division fuelled by perceptual distortion, from the intersectional forces of racism and sexism to the taxonomic logic of Western culture. Japan appealed to her as an escape from the latter, and she observed powerful links between everyday and traditional ritual in Japan and what she understood of the ritual cultures of Africa, shaping a cross-cultural commitment that would manifest as an Afro-Asian sensibility.6 This chapter defines and analyses the Afro-Asian, however provisionally, as a conceptual encounter, both a syncretic force and an experimental site for navigating across difference in histories, genders, and cultures. In other words, the Afro-Asian was itself a provisional gesture that mobilised ideas of “African-ness” and “Japanese-ness” to “establish a space of possibility”, as Catherine Wood writes, “in which the values she wanted to celebrate could be ceremonially shared”.7 As a dynamic engagement with African and Japanese culture, mediated through her experience of being a Black woman in the United States, Nengudi’s invocation of the Afro-Asian can be understood here as a tactic of mobility and radical affinity—rejecting the logic of appropriation or assimilation—that seeks out new modes of indeterminate cultural expression. Mobility, a central concept in the artist’s practice, applies to the body’s movement as well as the existential drive to negotiate opportunity and constraint; in this case, the constraint was Western

Really African, and Really Kabuki Too 171 thought, specifically its ideological underpinnings in notions of cultural superiority, artistic value, and gender and race as tools of hierarchy. Nengudi’s drive to harness the beauty and power of ritual through syncretic practice was fuelled by an earnest curiosity and love of global culture. “Art really is love… art is love”, she reflects. “I have a love for African culture and certain ways of doing and I have a love of Japanese ways of doing. And it has to do with, you know, this flow and improvisation on one side and then, ‘clean lines’, shall we say, or formulated ways of doing things”.8 Her practice exemplifies the inventive drive of a Black aesthetic that, as Richard Powell and Stuart Hall define it, is wholly committed to the “new”, especially in communities that value creativity in culture and performance across the African diaspora.9 Indeed, Nengudi includes “African total theatre” among a range of influences aligned with cathartically-driven, post-war action-based art: “Dada, environmentalists (Kaprow, Oldenburg, Serra, etc); Japanese avant-garde art in the 60s; modern dance, African total theatre”.10 In her own performative creations at the intersection of sculpture and dance, developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she wished, at the very least, that the viewer be moved by the work, and at best, be “drawn into it so deeply that their [sic] is no longer stage or audience, just the action”, so “you become part of the story”.11 The invitation to interact presented the possibility of reshaping existing matrices of social distortion—a goal pursued by other artists at the time as well, such as Adrian Piper, who in the early 1970s deployed conceptual strategies to directly address sexism and xenophobia in the public sphere, and in the therapeutic propositions of Brazilian neo-concretist artist Lygia Clark, often presented as sensory objects. Early articulations of this interest happened in graduate school, when Nengudi encased coloured water in heat-sealed vinyl and installed the liquid-filled packages as discrete geometric volumes or large sacks draped over ropes. Shaped by the pressure between their extrinsic physical barriers and their fluid interiors, they invited palpation from viewers. The attractive tension between body and material was also informed by the principles of Gutai art, in which, wrote founder Jiro Yoshihara: “the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed to each other”.12 Nengudi’s first major series, R.S.V.P. (Répondez S’il Vous Plaît), initiated in 1975 and shown shortly thereafter in Los Angeles and New York, synthesises these references. R.S.V.P. (˜1975–1980) encompasses sculptural installations made from used pantyhose filled with sand, often knotted around other castoff materials, such as rose petals, cardboard tubes, rubber, or wire, creating eclectic contrasts and sensory qualities (see Figs. 10.2–10.5). Nylon tethers, stretched like limbs, are tacked to the walls and ceiling in energetic webs, knotted and strung so that gravity distends their weighted volumes into ambiguously gendered, abstract forms. When manipulated by performers, they become dynamic installation environments that animate the tension between their defeated appearance and elastic energy. Nengudi wrote at this time: I am working with nylon mesh because it relates to the elasticity of the human body. From tender, tight beginnings to sagging end… The body can only stand so much push and pull until it gives way, never to resume its original shape. After giving birth to my own son, I thought of black wet-nurses suckling child after child—their own as well as those of others, until their breasts rested on their knees, their energies drained. My works are abstracted reflections of used bodies— visual images that serve my aesthetic as well as my ideas.13

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Figure 10.2  Reproduction of Inside/Outside, 1977 as it appears on the invitation to the R.S.V.P. exhibition (front), Just Above Midtown Gallery, New York, 1977, Senga Nengudi papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA.

Figure 10.3  Invitation to the R.S.V.P. exhibition (back), Just Above Midtown Gallery, New York, 1977, Senga Nengudi papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA.

Really African, and Really Kabuki Too 173

Figure 10.4  Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger with Performance Piece, Pearl C. Wood Gallery, 1977. Photo credit: Harmon Outlaw; Senga Nengudi. Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery Archives, New York.

She links her own experience to earlier generations of oppressed and objectified Black women, aligning the buoyancy of the flesh with life force and its sagging with the inevitable exhaustion of the body’s emotional and physical labour. Situating the used body as an imaginative vehicle of creative potential, not simply an exhausted vessel, Nengudi channelled the use of physics as a tool for anti-form and for infusing primary structures with an organic, corporeal, and ephemeral presence. Despite her clear engagement with ideas central to process art and post-minimalism, her work is rarely included in these histories.

Changing Contexts Nengudi’s year in Japan (fall 1966–spring 1967) was formative in the way that cultural immersion tends to be for a young person: adapting to cultural difference and language barriers, she developed an independence and fortitude, and relished the

174  Ellen Y. Tani

Figure 10.5  S enga Nengudi, Studio Performance with R.S.V.P., 1976, nylon mesh, sand, dried rose petals, and full-length wool skirt. Shown: R.S.V.P. X. Photo credit: Ken Peterson. Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Lévy Gorvy, New York and London; and Sprüth Magers.

opportunity to decentre the framework of Western thought that had characterised her education. Being a non-White foreigner prompted a critical reconsideration of how she identified—as a woman, an American citizen, and an African-American. There, she recognised her American privilege, gained an admiration for the tolerance modelled by another society and, in her yearning for community, felt emboldened to forge unforeseen connections. Her trip was ignited by the radical work of the Gutai Art Association (Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai), which she discovered in Michel Tapié and Tore Haga’s book Avant-garde Art in Japan (1962). She was floored and validated by their experimental actions, which involved performance, play, improvisation, and quotidian materials in conversation with the body and the environment.14 Nengudi shared with Gutai a belief that sensory exploration and participation could lead to liberating, mind-altering experiences; an appreciation for originality over style; and an enthusiasm for nontraditional sites of exhibition, qualities that still characterise her work. 15 Like them, she respected the irreverence of children: in a children’s dance class she taught in 1965 at the Pasadena Art Museum, Nengudi took note of one young student’s statement, “You know east, but you don’t know which way to go”.16 Within a few months of her arrival in Japan, in the winter of 1967, Nengudi (then Sue Ellen Irons) sent an airmail letter to her mother that read, “I’m changing mother

Really African, and Really Kabuki Too 175 dear. I don’t quite know how. You’ll have to tell me when I get back”.17 Midway through her time abroad, she missed the material comforts of home, lamented her lack of Black friends, and was reminded of her non-Japanese appearance daily but was settling into life with her host family, her courses at Waseda University, and getting to know the other American college students in her programme.18 Japan was a prism through which the links between US imperialism in the Pacific Rim and racial injustice at home became clear to Nengudi, then just a 23-year-old college graduate. As she negotiated her difference, she developed a new, critical perspective on American identity. Beyond her classmates and her host family, she most comfortably socialised with expatriate Americans at a nearby military base, but with increasing ambivalence. Like other students protesting against imperialism around the globe, Waseda students—whom she likened to Berkeley students—publicly agitated over the continued presence of US Armed forces in Japan, criticising them for irrevocably implicating Japan in the Vietnam War by using American bases for supply hubs. On the back of a photo of Waseda’s idyllic campus, indicating where students gathered to demonstrate, Nengudi wrote, “And of course 99% of the demonstrations are against American Imperialism and Vietnam. I’ve yet to meet a person who is for the war. Or for any… kind of war period”.19 Increasingly irritated with the nativism among the group of GIs with whom she socialised, who seemed ignorant of the changing tides in US civil rights and dismissive of the culture and people around them, she wrote to her mother, “Unfortunately these people are still in the dark ages, and I find much prejudice there”.20 The sculptures and performances conceived in the decade following her return from Japan reflect these tensions, as well as the aesthetic inspiration of Japanese costume, movement, and ritual, both in the traditional arts and in daily life. At the time, some contemporary Japanese artists invoked the traditional arts as a way of resisting Western cultural imperialism in the wake of the American occupation and preserving Japanese cultural heritage. Japanese theatrical traditions inherently preserved ancient ritual customs rooted in shamanic traditions that preceded Buddhist or Shinto religion and, for Nengudi, resonated with West African ritual traditions. 21 She took classes in Japanese traditional aesthetics and dance, visited Buddhist temples and shrines, and attended Kabuki and Noh theatre performances: “I loved the simple and purposeful way in which things were done—from traditional tea ceremonies to ceramics that are intentionally made to look imperfect. I was also excited by the sense of movement you see in traditional Japanese Noh theatre and the layering of emotional experiences I encountered in Kabuki”. 22 These qualities are rooted in costuming and masking: the dynamic choreography and colourful masks of Kabuki indicate emotion and personality, while in Noh, a more austere theatrical form, heavy fabrics worn in layers restrict the actors’ mobility, their sculptural folds exaggerating subtle motions.23 As a teenager, Nengudi trained at Lester Horton Dance Company—whose signature technique combined elements from Native American and Afro-Caribbean dance, Javanese and Balinese upper body isolations, Japanese arm gestures, and an approach to movement informed by anatomical study. Horton ran one of the country’s first integrated dance companies, and his technique was strongly shaped by his studies with Michio Ito in the late 1920s, specifically Ito’s approach to dance as a form of dramatic theatre, which often involved sculptural props. These precedents exemplify a polyculturalism that often stands in tension with what, from a more contemporary perspective, might register as cultural appropriation. Yet Nengudi’s reference to Japanese dance is not a problematic flattening of Asian culture, but rather a syncretic

176  Ellen Y. Tani invocation of both traditional and modern elements of Japanese dance. 24 Her AfroAsian practice was driven more by a desire to create movement-based cross-cultural language than by a romantic notion of the non-Black, non-White Other.

Community Nengudi changed her name from Sue Ellen Irons in 1974 after returning to Los Angeles from Harlem because, she observed, “I didn’t feel like the same person”. 25 Pregnant at the time, she sought materials that embodied her own physical transformation: stretching, expanding, sagging, and distending. Nylon mesh, which by the 1940s had been engineered into pantyhose to replace silk stockings, was inexpensive and conceptually rich. Though designed for strength and durability, it has a finite functional lifespan, losing its elasticity like the bodies whose appearance it was intended to preserve. With flexible structural and aesthetic qualities that ranged from taut to flaccid, from translucent to opaque, nylon pantyhose also carried the spirit and stresses of its wearer. Though Nengudi initially sought a way to make the works more rigid to ensure their permanence, curator Linda Goode Bryant of Just Above Midtown Gallery, a major proponent of her work at the time, encouraged her to embrace ephemerality as an inherent material quality. Nengudi ran with the idea, which aligned with her admiration for the metonymic power and gendered materiality of nylon: “my concept was I could take a whole show and put it in my purse. I could take it out of my purse and there would be no costs for installing or shipping. I liked this idea that a woman’s life is in her purse”. 26 In preparation for the works’ New York debut at Just Above Midtown in 1977, she completed a questionnaire that asked, among other questions, if her work could be described by existing stylistic categories. Nengudi answered, “In the general sense yes/Conceptual—but specifically no—I believe something new is developing that has not been categorised (that being good or bad)”. 27 The conceptual rigour of the work was easily eclipsed by its perceived feminist iconography: dangling forms resembling breasts, wombs, scrota, and buttocks suggested symbols of fertility and sexuality, and the work’s metaphorical link to pregnancy was palpable. These were traits commonly associated with Feminist Art, which was at the time coalescing in Southern California through the activities of The Woman’s Building. 28 Nengudi, who was involved with The Woman’s Building in the 1980s, recalls her relationship with Feminist Art as provisional (“like they were bean counting or something”) rather than authentic: “it never quite felt like home in the early days… My own Black community I found the most engaging and inspiring”. 29 She felt colonised by the term, bristling at the suggestion of White feminist practice as the primary framework through which to understand her work. “I was just doing what I was doing”, she says. “Then I noticed that people were putting me in the feminist framework. It’s sort of like, well, okay, if that’s what you want to do, you named Lake Victoria. You’re in an African country, and yet, you decided to name this place this or that”.30 And, yet, Black womanhood—in its collective energy and in its isolation— presented a complex and generative multiplicity from which her work emerged: “I was a Black woman. I was a mother. I was a caregiver at a certain point. I was an American. I was an African American in an American society. So, all of this was coming out of these experiences, and the stresses of these experiences, and the glory of these experiences”.31 Nengudi’s practice developed through supportive community

Really African, and Really Kabuki Too 177 and close friendship, especially her decades-long friendship with Maren Hassinger, who remains a consistent interlocutor and activator of Nengudi’s work.32 They were both participants in the ad hoc collective known as Studio Z, which improvised performances throughout Los Angeles: “I found myself making body art and doing performance art in my studio as well as studios of colleagues. But just as often if not more so in my immediate neighborhood as well as other parts of LA. These performances were often impromptu. It was about the tribe”.33 Communities like Studio Z were essential outlets for career support as well as a ready audience for Black artists, many of them women, who laboured in obscurity for years without opportunities to show their work in a gallery context.34 The communities of Black, Asian American, and Latinx artists to which Nengudi belonged offered mutual support and shaped her commitment to transracial and cross-cultural connection as a form of survival.35 Their persistence in spite of the White art world’s neglect—not to become a part of it, but to create alternative creative communities—reflects a decentring attitude. “While the white mainstream art world did their thing”, Nengudi says, “it did not stop us. We interacted with each other, appreciated each other’s cultures, and grew from these collaborations. And validated ourselves, I must say”.36 Embracing the margins as a space of creative growth, Nengudi and her peers understood how art could provide new models of connecting people to one another and to the world, especially through syncretic ritual. At this time, David Hammons harnessed the talismanic properties of black hair, scouring barbershop floors for sculptural materials; Betye Saar transformed the negative power of Black memorabilia into occult-like power objects, or “mojos”; and Houston Conwill combined African spirituality and personal mythology into “juju” installations. Drawing on African-based devotional practices and everyday rituals, their work showed that the simplest materials could be extraordinary in transformation at a time when many people of colour in Los Angeles were subject to uncontrollable pressures of socioeconomic and racial inequality. Witnessing the violence, fear, anger, and destruction of the Watts Rebellions that shook Los Angeles in 1965, and marvelling at the creative aftermath, Nengudi wrote the following: This concept of art is blown away when the place you live in is being burned to the ground. You have to think of another way. It makes perfect sense that you take what is left and form it into something that gives you strength and personal power, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.37 Nengudi worked at the Watts Towers Art Center with Noah Purifoy, who became its founding director in 1964. After the riots, he organised the exhibition 66 Signs of Neon to showcase the creative endeavours of artists who made assemblage from the remains of the burned, twisted, broken, and charred material environment. It opened in the spring of 1966, a few months before Nengudi travelled to Japan, and featured Purifoy’s own striking assemblages made of twisted and melted rubble in both abstract and figural compositions. Purifoy presented the works as catalysts for communication rather than objects for display or didactic representations: The reason for being in our universe is to establish communication with others, one to one… We wish to establish that there must be more to art than the creative act, more than the sensation of beauty, ugliness, color, form, light, sound,

178  Ellen Y. Tani darkness, intrigue, wonderment, uncanniness, bitter, sweet, black, white, life and death. There must be therein a ME and a YOU, who is affected permanently. Art itself is of little or no value if in its relatedness it does not effect change. (Purifoy 1966) The relational power of art to affect change on an interpersonal level signalled optimism in an era of seemingly unresolvable racial strain felt on a national scale (race riots broke out over racial discrimination and anti-Black violence in Harlem, 1964; Los Angeles, 1965; and Detroit and Newark, 1967).

Contextural Practice While she did not represent the Black experience figuratively, Nengudi sought to translate some conceptual aspects of it as part of a broader human condition through simple material language and improvisational activation, developing what Uri McMillan has described as “a new grammar of feeling and being”. 38 Unlike many practitioners of historic Conceptual Art, Nengudi and her peers sought materials that could give shape to the atmospheric forces that strained and eroded human relations. Disinterested in a tautological exploration of art, they instead explored the tension between intentional facture and the threat of its destruction, knowing that any subject who is interpellated by ideologies of racism and sexism bears the material and actionable consequences of the ideas of others. Unique to Black conceptualism is its commitment to materiality—specifically, a kind of talismanic rematerialisation that links the concept back to its world. 39 Her strategies are exemplary of Black conceptual artists who were, as Franklin Sirmans asserts, inspired by an urge to “at least attempt to fulfil Conceptual Art’s promise to reimagine the possibilities of art through the sociopolitical realities within which it was created”.40 The work became a crucible for dialectical exchange; for Nengudi, concepts of fluidity and rigidity, or tension and release were expressed in a range of hybrid forms whose materials derived from the remains of these processes as they unfolded in real life. Take nylon and sand for example: nylon pantyhose has a gendered social function to preserve the idealised feminine body through elasticity and translucency, preserving the body’s modesty while contouring its figure. But when filled with sand, its weight connotes an earthbound, mortal fate and constitutes a counterforce to nylon’s elasticity. The particulate quality of sand becomes a metaphor for the accumulated memories, traumas, and responsibilities that can burden as much as balance. This embrace of accumulated reference points exemplifies what Linda Goode Bryant and Marcy Phillips termed “contextural” in the 1978 exhibition catalogue Contextures. The neologism combines the concept of “texture” with “context” to advance a theory of conceptual materialism as an extension of conceptualism’s engagement with issues beyond art (or, what Joseph Kosuth defined in 1969 as “synthetic conceptualism”). Nengudi’s work graced the cover of the catalogue and was featured prominently in the exhibition, which was held at Just Above Midtown Gallery. The artists’ incorporation of discarded material—“clarifying and incorporating the contents of the margin”—expresses the texture and friction of marginality through salvaged material remains, rendered talismanic; they

Really African, and Really Kabuki Too 179 embody the relationship between art and reality.41 Or, as assemblage artist John Outterbridge claimed, “What is available to you is not mere material but the material and the essence of the political climate, the material in the debris of social issues”.42 Contextural practice resists the impulse to relegate Black artists’ work to the margins while also acknowledging the value of social debris, or as bell hooks has written, in creating new spaces of “radical openness” from and within the “profound edge” of the margin itself.43

Freeway The 1978 installation Freeway Fets, and the performance that consecrated its site, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, represents Nengudi’s cultural syncretism as a form of total theatre, incorporating costumes, props, and improvised dance and music conceived by Nengudi. In a grant proposal, she identifies Freeway Fets as an urban environmental-scaled version of her R.S.V.P. sculptures—to be similarly constructed with nylon pantyhose and weighted with sand but supplemented with ropes to keep the sculptural elements affixed to the concrete columns and sealed with a substance called rhoplex for durability. She wrote, “the general feeling of the piece is that of change of the human form through age… an inevitable occurrence. Because of the nature of the material there should be occasionally a subtle and graceful movement of the sculpture perpetuated by the wind”.44 The work’s incorporation of environmental forces (wind) recalls the artist’s appreciation of Gutai installation, as well as the haunting figural silhouettes she made in New York for urban facades.45 Nengudi sited Freeway Fets on the 1300 block of West Pico Boulevard, beneath a freeway overpass near the downtown Los Angeles Convention Center. She had considered the Kabuki Theatre, on West Adams Boulevard and Crenshaw in West Los Angeles, which showed Japanese films from 1964 to 1973.46 However, the freeway underpass appealed in the end because, with its dirt floor perforated by small palm tree shoots, it looked like what she imagined Africa might.47 This imaginary African stage is significant, for while her experience in Japan was immersive, Nengudi’s relationship to Africa is second-hand and highly mediated: she has not travelled to the continent and does not know her family’s lineage; her name, Senga Nengudi, given to her by a close friend from Zaire/Congo, links her to an imagined West African past.48 Attracted by the prospect of connections to a powerful and ancient motherland, she developed her idea of Africa from peers, books, and exhibitions of African art, as well as the absence of its history from her formal education and its negative representations in mass media.49 Nengudi’s knowledge of and references to Japanese culture, particularly its theatre arts, is more precise: she repeatedly cites the emotional dynamism of Kabuki, a fast-moving production intended to inspire awe in the viewer, and Noh theatre’s sparse scenography, sculptural costuming, and supernatural stories. Ceremony for Freeway Fets was designed to consecrate the sculptural installation through performance, dance, ceremony, and ritual, as well as honour collective loss and survival. High on the overpass columns, some of the nylon mesh forms represented male energy and others represented female energy (Fig. 10.6). “On one column I inscribed the names of our children, on another the names of

180  Ellen Y. Tani

Figure 10.6  S enga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, Los Angeles, 1978, from right to left: David Hammons (holding staff), Senga Nengudi (in yellow drapery) and Maren Hassinger (in white); Upper left: Freeway Fets installation. Courtesy of Levy Gorvy, New York and London.

ancestors, relatives, and personal friends, some of whom had succombed [sic] to the dis-ease of being black in America. I had grave concerns about the tenuous relationships between black men and women. I wished to portray myself as a uniting spirit, a harmonising spirit between those two factions”. 50 Some of Nengudi’s collaborators from Studio Z played music while others dressed as “activators” in nylon headdresses while holding other props. The event was documented by filmmaker Barbara McCullough and photographer Roderick Young. Nengudi asked Maren Hassinger to embody the female spirit, while David Hammons embodied the male spirit. Nengudi, draped in a billowing yellow sheet, represented a mediating force of reconciliation between male and female, both secure and transcendent in her costume. 51 She fondly recalls that one observer, unaware of her affection for Japanese and African culture, described the performance as “really African, but really Kabuki, too”. 52 The Afro-Asian quality of the work emerged in the interaction of bodies and objects with symbolic intention and kinetic improvisation. Participant Maren Hassinger recalled the performance as having the same “burst of insane, from nowhere, kind of energy” in the form of spinning, darting, and

Really African, and Really Kabuki Too 181 otherwise dramatic movement that she and Nengudi associated with the African theatrical tradition. 53 At the time, Nengudi was interested in possession and how spiritual energies could infiltrate and animate the body, specifically the syncretic Afro-Caribbean dance method of choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. She described this performance, her first time dancing publicly with a mask—as transformative: “As I gave myself up to the music and the situation, I became other than myself. The concept took over and fulfilled itself”. 54 The nylon headdresses, knotted nylon bundles adorning the participants’ necks, and tarps that draped over dancers’ bodies were designed to enhance the impact of bodily gesture. We can see in Costume Study for Mesh Mirage, made just one year prior, a more formal exploration of how loose drapery abstracts the body’s appearance and how masking the head tightly with pantyhose exaggerates its contours, generating an embodiment of dialectical forces. If there is a direct link between the costuming in Ceremony for Freeway Fets and West African rituals of masking, as Kellie Jones has observed, it is Yoruba masquerade, with its elaborately carved wooden headdresses, often incorporating fabric, and vibrant cloth costumes that sway with the body. Yoruba Gèlèdé masquerade aligns conceptually and formally with Nengudi’s intentions: it supported positive gender relations by honouring women of the community and their female ancestors, while expressing ideals of male and female behaviour through dance. 55 Nengudi’s occupation of the mediating spirit across gender, and the work’s exploration of Afro-Asian theatrical experience more broadly, powerfully articulate her desire to explore tension and release, and to resolve difference through the social architecture of sculptural performance. Nengudi’s work represents an artistic perspective and cultural curiosity shaped by the unique landscape of Los Angeles and by her departures and returns to that city; from Japan and, nearly a decade later, from New York. In her sculptures and performances, which reflect no specific style or known category of artistic practice, one finds a sense of freedom and mobility within a system of tethered attachments. Such generative strain is the impetus behind the artist’s Afro-Asian sensibility, a conceptual positioning that, while anchored to identifiable points, occupies a unique and dynamic space in their midst. Within this space, there is compression and expansion, structure and surface, and tension and release.

Notes 1 Interview with the author, May 24, 2020. 2 Senga Nengudi, Artist questionnaire from Just Above Midtown Gallery, circa 1977. Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 3 Following Miwon Kwon’s theory of site-specific practice, Ian Edward Wallace situates the metonymic power of RSVP’s in social space rather than specific location: it asserts black mobility within spaces of its exclusion. “Used Bodies,” in Senga Nengudi: Topologien/ Topologies, ed. Stephenie Weber and Matthias Mühling (München: Hirmer, 2019), 138–139. 4 Nengudi, “Artist’s statement” in Senga Nengudi, ed. Begum Yasar (New York, NY: Dominique Lévy Gallery, 2015), 82. 5 Interview with the author, May 24, 2020. 6 Nengudi, 1966. Senga Nengudi Papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Nengudi is not alone among African-American artists who explored Asian influences in the late twentieth century; see Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 272–276.

182  Ellen Y. Tani 7 Catherine Wood, "Nengudian Woman," in Senga Nengudi: Topologien/Topologies, ed. Matthias Mühling and Stephanie Weber (München: Hirmer, 2020), 101. 8 Interview with the author, May 24, 2020. 9 Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 15. 10 Nengudi, “Artist’s Questionnaire,” 1977. Total theatre, or gesamtkunstwerk, is defined as the unification of various art forms with the aim of creating an overwhelming, often immersive experience. See Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949– 1979, ed. Kristine Stiles (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998). 11 Other examples of Nengudi’s performances in this vein include Flying (1982), Air Propo (1981), Get Up (1979). Nengudi, “Artist’s Questionnaire,” 1977. 12 Yoshihara Jiro. “Gutai Manifesto,” originally published as “Gutai bijutsu sengen,” Geijutsu Shincho , Vol. 7 no. 12 (December 1956): 202–204. Translated by Reiko Tomii. Online: http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/gutai/data/manifesto.html 13 Senga Nengudi, “Artist’s statement for the exhibition “Newcomers.” Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, curated by Josine Ianco-Starrels, October 13–November 14, 1976,” Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 14 See Weber (2019), 120. Dismissing high art’s esoteric transformation of materials, Gutai artists experimented with “concrete” materials and techniques taken from everyday life: newspapers, metal, masking tape, fabric, wood, inner tubes, plastic sheeting, water, sand, mud, smoke (Tiampo 2011, 23). 15 Elissa Auther, Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures (Denver, CO: Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2015), 23. 16 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 17 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Box 7, Folder 33. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 18 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 19 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 20 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Box 7, Folder 33. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 21 Jones (2017), 208. 22 “‘I Believe Deeply that the Best Kind of Art is Public’: An Interview with Senga Nengudi.” Senga Nengudi, interview with Osei Bonsu. Frieze online, September 22, 2018. https://frieze.com/article/i-believe-deeply-best-kind-art-public-interview-senga-nengudi (accessed August 31, 2019). 23 Noh is a highly regimented, official ceremonial art form of fourteenth-century origin, characterised by its aesthetic austerity and its sculptural costuming. It often centres on Buddhist philosophies or themes of the supernatural conveyed through poetic language and spare, tonal music. 24 Nengudi thus avoids the paradoxes of “Afro-Orientalism”—see Bill Mullen, AfroOrientalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, “Black Bodies/Yellow Masks The Orientalist Aesthetic in Hip-Hop and Black Visual Culture” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006), 188–203. 25 N’senga, the original name given to her, signified “smiling woman of the village” or “auntie,” though she has since simplified the name to Senga. 26 Jori Finkel, “Q&A: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2011. Online: http://articles.latimes. com/2011/nov/27/entertainment/la-capst-kellie-jones- interview-20111127. 27 Nengudi, “Artist’s Questionnaire,” 1977. 28 CalArts faculty members Judy Chicago (who had founded the school’s Feminist Art program), Arlene Raven, and Sheila Levrant de Breville cofounded The Feminist Studio Workshop (1973–1991) in The Woman’s Building near MacArthur Park.

Really African, and Really Kabuki Too 183 29 Senga Nengudi, Oral history interview, July 9–11, 2013. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 30 Senga Nengudi, Interview with the author, August 13, 2019. Audio: 1:20:23. 31 Senga Nengudi, Interview with the author, August 13, 2019. Audio: 1:20:23. 32 See John Bowles, “Side by Side: Friendship as Critical Practice in the Performance Art of Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger,” Callaloo, Vol. 39 no. 2 (2016): 400–418. 33 Studio Z members included, among others, Houston Conwill, Kathy Cyrus, Ron Davis, David Hammons, Greg Edwards, Duval Lewis, Frank Parker, Joe Ray, Roho, and Roderick Young. Senga Nengudi, Oral history group interview and moderated public conversation with Maren Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, Barbara McCullough, and Senga Nengudi and conducted by Kellie Jones and Judith Wilson. “Modern Art in Los Angeles: African American Avant-Gardes 1965–1990.” Generated by the Getty Research Institute through its Modern Art in Los Angeles and Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. initiatives, January 15–16, 2008. 34 Bowles (2016), 401. 35 Jones (2017), 272–275. 36 Senga Nengudi, Interview with the author, August 13, 2019. 37 Senga Nengudi, interview with Osei Bonsu (2018). 38 Uri McMillan, “Sand, Nylon, and Dirt: Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger in Southern California,” in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985: New Perspectives, ed. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley (New York: Brooklyn Museum), 115. 39 Nizan Shaked has discussed how synthetic conceptualism, as opposed to the analytic conceptualism traditionally associated with historic Conceptual Art, catalysed the development of a critical conceptualism employed by artists of colour in the late twentieth century. Nizan Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 40 Franklin Sirmans, “An American Art Job,” in Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970, ed. Valerie Cassel Oliver (Houston, TX: Contemporary Art Museum Houston, 2005), 20; see Oliver’s essay “Through the Conceptual Lens: the Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Blackness.” in this book as well, and Ellen Tani, “Black Conceptualism and the Atmospheric Turn, 1968–2008,” PhD Diss (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2015). 41 Linda Goode Bryant and Marcy Phillips, Contextures (New York, NY: Just Above Midtown, 1978), 39. The exhibition included artists David Hammons, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, and others. 42 Quoted in Naima J. Keith, “Rebellion and Its Aftermath: Assemblage and Film in L.A. and London,” Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, ed. Kellie Jones (Los Angeles, CA: Hammer Museum, 2011), 86. 43 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 148–149. 44 Senga Nengudi, “Draft of CETA proposal, October 1977,” Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Nengudi participated in the CETA program through the Brockman Gallery. 45 For a brief discussion of this work, see Stephanie Weber, “Dynamic Topologies,” in Senga Nengudi: Topologein/Topologies, ed. Matthias Mühling and Stephanie Weber (Müchen: Hirmer Publishers, 2020), 42–43. 46 By the 1940s, it was a favoured neighbourhood of black celebrities; John Coltrane was known to regularly perform with his band at the Kabuki in after-hours sets, following their regular Saturday night gigs (Porter et al 2008, 15). 47 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 48 Interview with the author, May 31, 2020. 49 Interview with the author, May 31, 2020. 50 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

184  Ellen Y. Tani 51 “I dealt with my shyness by performing under a tarp and mask, which felt transcendent. It was an extension of being influenced by and interested in African traditions”. Senga Nengudi, interview with Osei Bonsu (2018). 52 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Weber (2019). 53 Jones (2017), 201. 54 Senga Nengudi papers, 1947, circa 1962–2017. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 55 Jones (2017), 202–203.

11 Kirsten Justesen The Body as a Feminist and Artistic Tool Tania Ørum

Kirsten Justesen was one of the first practitioners of body art in Denmark. Over the course of her career, she has consistently used her body as a tool with which to explore the material qualities and social conditions of women’s lives, from experiences of pregnancy and housework to broader issues concerning prevailing gender mythologies, political activism, and feminist protest. This essay charts the development of Justesen’s unique approach to feminist conceptual art through an examination of her experimental practice and various collaborative projects from 1968 until the end of the 1970s. Looking closely at key works, I show that Justesen’s approach to her own body (and occasionally the bodies of other women) is concerned neither with the autobiographical or confessional, nor with the ideas of authenticity and identity that characterised much feminist art at the time. Rather, her art centred on social, political, and cultural constructions of femininity. Indeed, Justesen’s focus on the construction of gendered norms is inseparable from the conceptual and material construction of her works, which were always in dialogue with the contemporary art scene within which her practice was situated. Throughout her career as an artist, Justesen’s body has served as a tool with which to visualise the many ways in which the personal is political. From her first two sculptures, Skulptur I and Skulptur II (1968), which play a minimalist game with the classical conventions of sculptural representations of women, Justesen has used her body to address questions about the relationship between art and gender. The performative and theatrical deployment of minimalism in these early works was put to analytical and political use again in the staging of Images of Women (1970), a collaborative project that juxtaposed realist and conceptual strategies to deconstruct the apparently “natural” roles and rituals of women’s lives, revealing them to be social and historical constructions. In both her sculptural and photographic practices, Justesen’s engagement with feminist themes, such as pregnancy and motherhood, brings a similar degree of critical reflection to bear on her body as staged in recognisable situations or while striking poses that seem to suggest political commentary rather than individual experience. “The personal is political” was a central tenet of the feminist movement in Denmark and elsewhere in the 1970s, foregrounding the importance of connecting individual experience to social context in order to demand political and economic parity. For Justesen, however, the slogan also denoted a conceptual approach to artmaking that held that any kind of material and media could be used to reveal the complex ways that personal experiences and daily life are inscribed in larger social and political issues. From her first major works, Kirsten Justesen’s formal

186  Tania Ørum experimentation has been an integral part of her feminist engagement. As Tony Godfrey has argued, conceptual art is reflexive, based on a critical spirit and continual self-critique.1 Justesen’s conceptual art practice is a critical and analytical questioning not only of what art can be, as Godfrey suggests, but of what it means to be a feminist artist. Justesen was educated as a classical figural sculptor at the newly founded, but quite conservative, Academy of Fine Art in Aarhus from 1965 to 1968. She balanced the conservative education at the academy with extensive extramural activities in local avant-garde circles that introduced radical new art forms such as happenings, environments, fluxus, and intermedia art to the community. In Aarhus, and across the rest of Denmark, these avant-garde groups were extremely male dominated, which made it difficult for women artists to participate in exhibitions and events in more than a performative or organisational capacity. 2 While the general tendencies of 1960s avant-garde art—the performative turn, the use of everyday materials, the use of the artists’ bodies and daily lives, and the intermedial approach—helped to open the art world to women artists, and made it possible to include women’s specific experiences, in social terms male artists, as well as curators, art historians, galleries, and museums, were not yet ready to make room for women artists. It was not until Justesen was ready to leave Aarhus in the summer of 1968 that she formulated her own response to her experiences of both the avant-garde scene and her classical training. Justesen took key elements from the formal training she received at the academy and the experimentalism of the avant-garde and combined them to develop a unique approach that linked questions about the material and conceptual construction of art objects and images to those concerning the social construction of gender. Many women artists have shared personal images and stories. Like them, Justesen also uses her own body and autobiographical material, but her work is in many ways distinct from body art transnationally. She avoids the confessional mode in favour of a historical and material framing that extends the experiences presented to include other women. In her work, the female body is characterised neither in terms of its vulnerability nor its sexuality, as with contemporary women artists like Marina Abramović, Ana Mendiata, or Carolee Schneemann. Nor is it provocative in the aggressive way deployed by Valie Export to confront the bigotry of Austrian bourgeois society, for example. Perhaps because sexuality was less of a taboo in the more relaxed and liberated Scandinavian context, it was not as urgent for Justesen to focus on the sexuality of the female body. 3 Female desire and eroticism is primarily explored in Justesen and collaborator Jytte Rex’s film Tornerose (Sleeping Beauty) (1971). In other works, the artist’s presentation of the female body seems to echo another slogan of the 1970s Danish feminist movement: “Women are strong”, pointing to the ways that women can make their power felt within both public and private spheres. In Justesen’s work, the female body is often used as a sculptural element among other kinds of organic and inorganic materials such as ice, fish, or birds (mostly in works from a later period than the one covered here) or posed in situations that carry more general political gender implications. Her approach maintains a very delicate balance between private, even intimate, material and women’s collective social and historical conditions. This balance depends on the precision of the conceptual organisation of the sculpture or image; a balance between verfremdung and recognition.

Kirsten Justesen 187

Skulptur I and Skulptur II Justesen’s first two major works were created before the feminist movement emerged in Denmark and are clearly in dialogue with developments in minimalist sculpture occurring at this time, entirely outside the horizon of the art academies and the then dominant tendency of spontaneous abstraction. By the late 1960s, Danish minimalism was an avant-garde phenomenon, driven by anti-institutional groups such as the self-organised Experimental Art School in Copenhagen.4 Minimalism was a radical departure from the metaphysical and subjectivist art of the postwar period, in that it foregrounded the constructive dimensions of art and implicitly subverted the gendered mythologies surrounding the artist-as-genius through extreme aesthetic reduction, deskilling, and the supposed eradication of any trace of the artist’s hand. Although this helped open the door for women to enter the art field, only a few Danish women artists (such as Kirsten Ortwed, Viera Collaro, and Anita Jørgensen) took up minimalist strategies, and most of them at a somewhat later date. Justesen entered this experimental minimalist field with considerable confidence and with a definite female presence that was new within the Danish context of male minimalists. Her two early sculptures were the first to actively bring gender into the minimalist frame. As their generic titles indicate, Skulptur I (Sculpture I) and Skulptur II (Sculpture II) from 1968 conduct an interrogation of the basic conventions of sculpture (Figs. 11.1 and 11.2). Female presence is asserted via the artist’s imaging of her own body, an assertion that critically reflects on the way sculptural conventions have traditionally imaged women’s bodies. In doing so, it highlights the relation between the woman artist and the female model, thus bridging the gap between active subject and passive object, positions that are traditionally gendered as masculine and feminine respectively.

Figure 11.1  K risten Justesen, Sculpture I, 1968, 39.4 × 39.4 × 3.4 in. (100 × 100 × 10 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

188  Tania Ørum

Figure 11.2  K risten Justesen, Sculpture II, 1968, 19.7 × 23.6 × 23.6 in. (50 × 60 × 60 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Sculpture I consists of three large boxes hung in a corner, so that one box is to the left of the corner and two boxes are on the right side of the corner. Boxes are a minimalist favourite since they were believed to be neutral, inexpressive, standard forms devoid of any subjective or symbolic meaning. The box on the left side has a mirrored surface. The first box on the right side of the corner is white and the second displays a photograph of the back of a woman (Justesen herself) looking into a mirror and multiplied by the reflection. The boxes on the right side are reflected in the mirror on the box on the left, creating an illusion of depth. The artist has explained that this piece was intended as a basic sculptural demonstration: the sculptural space is activated when the viewer steps into the corner, and the space is multiplied as the viewer looks into the mirror and sees the photograph of the figure mirrored again and again. The viewer thus becomes part of the sculpture.5 The minimal elements of the sculpture and the active involvement of the audience is characteristic of what Michael Fried described in 1967 as the “theatrical” sensibility inherent in the new minimalist sculpture of this period, which is “concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters” the work.6 Minimalist sculptures are not supposed to symbolise or represent but, rather, are intended to simply

Kirsten Justesen 189 assert their presence as physical objects, engaging the viewer’s body often through variations of scale, position, and repetition that encourage movement around or through them. Fully conversant with contemporary sculptural theory, Justesen’s corner sculpture not only asserts the objecthood of the work that Fried observed but also inserts the female body as the object of the viewer’s look. Justesen thus transgresses the rule that minimalism should be devoid of representational content and seems to suggest that all visual and embodied encounters are inevitably gendered. While reflective surfaces were used by many minimalists at the time, Justesen’s use of the mirror not only implicates the viewer’s body in the sculptural object, it also cites the long art historical tradition in which women are depicted looking into mirrors. In Sculpture I, however, the mirror is an analytic tool, rather than a symbol of female vanity. In Justesen’s own photographic documentation of the work, she stands in front of the box on the right, dressed in black, like the mirrored women in the photograph on the sculpture. With her back turned to the viewer, the black-clad artist thus joins the row of women reflected in the mirror on the box on the left. The women seen from the back may be a reference to the impressionist painter Anna Ancher (1859–1935) who, in her studies of colour and light, often depicted women seen from behind, absorbed in their work. For Danish viewers, this image may have also evoked a recurrent motif in the well-known work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), wherein the image of the woman’s back serves to represent not an actual person, but functions like a sculptural element such as a door or chair. The psychological atmosphere of his compositions is generated through the artist’s use of colour and sparse composition.7 The artist and the mirrored row of women in Justesen’s work share a similar sculptural function. As the image of the artist joins the row of women, she seems to contemplate the traditional anonymous role of female models in art, one that could easily include herself, thus reflecting on the position of the woman artist in relation to the model. Sculpture I thus explores the relation between woman as object/sculpted body and woman as subject/artist and anticipates the later discussion of what the Danish feminist writer Jette Lundby Levy called women’s “double gaze” in a patriarchal society. The term describes how women traditionally view themselves not only as subjects but also as objects of the dominant male gaze, which they have internalised.8 However, the female figure multiplied in the work turns her back to the viewer’s gaze (as does the artist herself in the installation view). She does not offer her body to the viewer nor does her expression or pose seem to invite a relation of intimacy. Reflecting Justesen’s status here as both maker and muse, Sculpture I unsettled the longstanding gendered binaries of artist/model, subject/object, and viewer/viewed that have shaped the conventions of sculpture and artmaking more broadly. In contrast to other Danish minimalists in the late 1960s, who tended to avoid any figurative or corporeal elements as well as any reference to classical traditions, Justesen drew on her classical education and feminist perspective to include both the female figure and historical reflection in her gender-conscious reworking of minimalism. Sculpture II is a cardboard box the approximate size of a pedestal. However, instead of putting a woman’s body on top of it, Justesen placed a photograph of herself inside the box. As she has pointed out, this work fulfils every sculptural rule: it has height, depth, width, is supported by the floor, and relates phenomenologically to the scale and viewing angle of the audience.9 However, by inserting a photograph inside the “pedestal”, instead of erecting a sculpture on top of it, Justesen confounds the dispositions of

190  Tania Ørum her classical training, just as she does through her irreverent use of the cheap ephemeral material of cardboard instead of stone or clay, and by replacing the laborious modelling of a three-dimensional figure with the quick technique of two-dimensional photography. Her use of a standard cardboard box and the mechanically reproducible medium of photography, signal anti-monumentalism and anti-academism in line with the emphasis, current in contemporary local avant-garde circles, on art as an experimental process rather than a unique and expensive product to be marketed or preserved in a museum.10 The emphasis on process and materiality is further underlined by the fact that the box can be collapsed and hung on a wall, indicating an expanded conception of sculpture detached from classical standards, notions that she shared with other contemporary Danish minimalists. But the choice of materials also speaks to a specific situation: for a young woman artist working out of her quotidian household space, a cardboard box and her own body were materials that were immediately at hand, inexpensive, and did not require access to large studio space.11 In Sculpture II, like Sculpture I, the viewer is presented with the artist’s back, but here the artist is nude, as sculptures of women so often are. More flesh is visible, but Justesen’s face remains partially hidden by her hair and her gaze is averted as she is crouched in a seemingly uncomfortable position to fit herself within the box. The image can be read both as a metaphor for the confined space women are allotted in art and society, and, more dynamically, as a woman ready to spring out of her subdued position. The artist’s body as represented in these two early sculptures functions not as a personal testimony but, rather, a conceptual element pointing out shared cultural conditions of women in art and society. Justesen’s deployment of the cube acts as both minimalist form and gendered cage. The contained body and mirrored surfaces of the sculptures suggest the ways women’s bodies are circulated within a traditional politics of representation as well as the literal packaging of them as merchandise, boxed up and ready to carry, or locked into self-absorbed reflection in the vanity industry. These two sculptures, and other works by Justesen from this period, are clearly in dialogue with the experimental attitudes and techniques developed in the expanded field of sculpture in Denmark in the late 1960s, an intensely political period when social, political, and artistic activism flourished. The performative turn that took place during this moment in minimalist sculpture, happenings, public exhibitions, and other media was not only an artistic phenomenon, but one that was visible in public political activism as young people organised demonstrations against the American war in Vietnam and protested against the housing situation and commercial exploitation of youth culture. Activists set up squatters’ communes, concerts, and alternative communities intended to prefigure a new society, advocating for a change in normative lifestyle including the institution of non-hierarchical personal relations. In her practice as an artist and an activist, Justesen made use of the arsenal of material and conceptual methods made available at the time by actors from within both the cultural and political spheres.

Art and Politics in the 1960s and 1970s When Justesen moved to Copenhagen in 1968 to enrol at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, she joined a group of students who went by the collective name Kanonklubben (the Canon Club) who, for a period, organised their own education, staged alternative

Kirsten Justesen 191 exhibitions, and collaborated on a number of artistic and social collective projects. Collective projects were part of contemporary political culture and were a useful way to critique the myths of individual artistic genius and other gendered tropes fuelled by the demands of the commercial art market. The group also shared a camera—hence their name. The newly affordable small portable cameras were seen as a means of recording aspects of everyday life not hitherto considered worthy of artistic or media presentation, including women’s reproductive work and other aspects of their personal lives. Kanonklubben’s acquisition of a shared Super 8 camera initiated Justesen’s long-standing photographic practice, and her workbook of photographs has served as a resource for a continuing series of photographic and other work. Kanonklubben’s collaborative activities are an example of what Rosalind Krauss has called sculpture in the expanded field: they involved artistic practices, but ones that often took place entirely beyond the institutional confines of the art world.12 This blending of art, activism, and life was characteristic of general avant-garde strategies in the politicised context of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Denmark and features in Justesen’s life and work as well. In the late 1970s, some members of the Kanonklubben group gave up on art altogether and, instead, chose to devote their lives to social and political work for several decades. Justesen, however, continued her conceptual art practice throughout these years, thus adhering to the fusion of art, life, and politics. The political utility of performance and other conceptual strategies, especially in the hands of women artists, was demonstrated when the women members of the Kanonklubben group staged a pioneering series of performative events called Damebilleder (Images of Women) between April 12 and April 24, 1970, which helped launch the feminist movement in Denmark and coincided with the first feminist march through Copenhagen.13 A few consciousness-raising groups had been formed in January 1970, and the April march was intended to mark the emergence of the budding Danish feminist movement. Members of the movement called themselves Rødstrømper, a name inspired by the American Redstocking group and intended to signal their shared feminist and socialist goals. They wanted not only equal rights, but an overthrow of the entire social order that would abolish social, economic, and gender privileges. In order to attract attention and encourage feminist activism, the Rødstrømpe group, which was made up of mostly university women, used performative artistic strategies during the march, parodically dressing up in bras, suspenders, and wigs while instigating a game of cat-and-mouse with the police before the march by constantly spreading new rumours about their choice of route through the city. The series of events staged by members of Kanonklubben, however, were more analytical in their critique of women’s position in society. They deployed experimental happenings and exhibition practices developed during the 1960s as a performative genre of their own, one that was eminently suited to exploring the new feminist terrain emerging for them both as women artists and in their own personal lives. The series of performative events was their first experience of working together in a women-only group. This cooperative working process functioned in the same way as the contemporary consciousness-raising groups that were the basic units of the feminist movement in many contexts, enabling the artists to share personal and professional experiences and discover the degree to which their private and artistic problems were in fact collective and political. This journey of consciousness-raising was visible in the development of the events, which started as a critique of oppressive gender roles

192  Tania Ørum and ended in a utopian image of a better collective life. The process-centred artworks thus combined political activism, personal enlightenment, and the exploration of a range of new forms of artistic engagement, from individual and collective performances to public sculpture, interactive exhibitions, and durational collective events that fused elements of private and public life. Indeed, as Justesen has described, Images of Women was a discovery and framing of a new area of joint artistic and political exploration: feminist art practice now went hand in hand with the personal struggle for liberation.14 The first of the seven events organised by the women of Kanonklubben opened at the students’ quarters of the Academy. It was a modest place but had the advantage of facing a central square in Copenhagen. The first event was called Luderen (The Hooker) and showcased women as sexual objects. The audience looked through a glass door into a room that held a bed, a chair, and a bedside table. The artists took turns sitting in the room wearing only underwear and a blonde wig, bathed in lurid light that recalled the red-light district in Amsterdam. For the second event, Opvasken (Dishes), the group collected their dirty dishes from home and stacked them in the exhibition to visualise women’s hidden household work and to protest against the gendering of that and other forms of care or reproductive labour. The third event, Skønheden (Beauty), highlighted the commercial construction of beauty standards imposed on women. For this interactive event, the group hired the cosmetic firm Max Factor to demonstrate their products in the exhibition room, which had been papered in pink plastic for the action and was open to participation by viewers as well. Event number four, Bryllupskagen (The Wedding Cake), focused on the institution and rituals of matrimony. It took place at a different location, a small pavilion often used for separate exhibitions. The women wrapped the entire pavilion in blue and white plastic and ribbons so that it looked like a giant wedding cake topped by a bride and groom on the roof. The building was still visible beneath the plastic strips, clearly demonstrating the social construction of marriage, already somewhat ludicrously symbolised by a cake. After these initial events critiquing stereotypical images of women, the series took a more militant and activist turn. The fifth event, Forsvaret (Defense), comprised two interactive days of professional self-defence instruction for artists and visitors hosted in the initial exhibition room. This event anticipated the self-defence courses that were to become a permanent feature of the feminist movement, aimed at lessening women’s fear of assault and turning potential victims of violence into persons capable of defending themselves. The sixth event, Kjortlerne (The Dresses), turned the room in the basement of the Academy into a classic women’s workplace, whether at home or in a sweatshop or factory, wherein women were sewing red dresses and bed sheets. The final event, Lejren (The Camp), lasted for several days during which the artists and their children all dressed in red and lived together in the now completely red room. This utopian image of collective living included the young children of the artists, since they could not be left alone during the event, but also as a political gesture, indicating that it was possible for women artists to integrate life and art. The camp culminated in a final Festen (Party) celebrating the new life of sister solidarity with red food, candles, and flowers as signs of “enthusiasm, will-power, love, and rebellion”.15 The Images of Women events brought together recognisable scenes from women’s lives and conceptual art strategies in a way that would continue to be characteristic of Justesen’s subsequent art practice. It showed that feminist avant-garde strategies

Kirsten Justesen 193 could be highly effective politically. In the politicised context of the 1970s, many artists wanted their art to have a direct social impact, but the artistic interventions often missed their goal, to the extent that the avant-garde approach they used had limited appeal for those who preferred more immediately understandable agitational art that could reach a large audience and was, in many cases, perceived as less elitist. Images of Women managed to catch the attention of the media and a wider audience, which was rare for self-organised art events and could have been due, in part, to their conjunction with the Rødstrømpe march. The events helped raise awareness of the new feminist movement and encouraged women artists, in particular, to claim access to the art world. Some of the best works by women artists from the 1970s embody this successful merging of art and feminist politics that had its beginning in the Images of Women events. After the Images of Women events, Justesen and fellow Kanonklubben member Jytte Rex continued working together to produce the remarkable film Tornerose var et vakkert barn (Sleeping Beauty) (1971).16 Here again, the artists structured the project as a series of tableaux, each focused on a woman or girl who talks about and performs her desires and dreams. The anti-narrative structure allowed the filmmakers to juxtapose a variety of women of different ages and classes without forcing their individual stories and fantasies into an essentialised or unified whole. Each of the seven tableaux was filmed with a static camera, partly due to the remedial technical equipment available and partly inspired by the technique of Andy Warhol, whose work influenced that of numerous contemporary avant-garde filmmakers in Denmark.17 While the Images of Women events focused on women’s liberation from oppressive sociocultural structures and institutions, this film was concerned with the inner liberation of women.18 The film medium and the emphasis on inner experiences are typical of Rex’s subsequent work, while the analytical use of tableaux is closer to the Images of Women events and Justesen’s continuing conceptual work. When the Kanonklubben group dispersed, Justesen went on to become a political activist in the women’s movement and later an editor of the feminist magazine Kvinder (Women), which ran from 1975 to 1984. The collective feminist activities among Danish women artists culminated in the large exhibition Kvindeudstillingen XX (The Women’s Exhibition XX), at the Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall in Copenhagen in 1975, which included 34 Danish women artists and 42 artists from other countries, among them Marina Abramović and Valie Export, who both turned up in Copenhagen for the event.19 This large exhibition was organised by several groups of women to coincide with the first International Women’s Year declared by the United Nations. It included professional and amateur artists as well as documentary political, cultural, and art historical material. The event also included performances, readings, and discussions, and this broad and lively mixture proved highly successful, attracting 25,000 visitors in a fortnight. 20 After the effort of bringing together the many different strands of feminism and women’s art at this large exhibition, collective feminist energies seem to have been exhausted in Denmark. Professional artists did not have the same interests as amateurs, nor did the various groups of women share the same definition of feminism or choice of political strategies. So while this was the collective culmination of the preceding five years of feminist art, it was also the end of large feminist exhibitions in Denmark. In the years following Kvindeudstillingen XX, the various groups and single artists involved went their separate ways. While Justesen and a few others

194  Tania Ørum such as Lene Adler Petersen continued their conceptual art practices, other women artists inspired by the political and feminist movements of the time turned to more traditional imagery to make their political point or chose artistic strategies in line with their own feminist views. Danish feminist art from the 1970s, therefore, ranges widely to include the socialist-realist wood-cuts of Dea Trier Mørch, the figural paintings of Ursula Reuter Christiansen, the agitprop posters of Røde Mor (the music and art group Red Mother), Helen Lait Kluge’s collages mythologising the relationship between women and nature, Susanne Ussing’s sculptural works exploring the feminine nature of organic shapes, as well as works that revaluate traditional female handicrafts, as can be seen in the works of mainly amateur artists.

Conceptual Feminist Art Justesen’s statement “My body is my tool” is one that remained relevant to her practice throughout her artistic career. In retrospect, she has explained, After the experiments in the sixties all strategies were available. One was no longer confined to certain materials or circumstances, one was free to use artistic strategies on any kind of material, from political demonstrations to personal life. That is a conceptual strategy, and the experimental turn of the sixties implied that everyday stuff and everything at hand could be used in art. I use my own body because it is at hand. That was clearly connected to the fantastic personal experience of a female body during pregnancy and birth and to the basic sculptural beauty of a pregnant body—but it is not private or confessional art. 21 In accordance with a phrase that has come to define much feminist art of the time, “the personal is political”, Justesen made casts of her pregnant body and documented the process using Kanonklubben’s Super 8 Canon camera. She later developed the stills into silkscreen prints and two series of sculptures (1969–1973). One of the pregnancy series is titled Omstændigheder (Circumstances) (1973), which is a pun because, in Danish, “to be in circumstances” is a phrase that means “to be pregnant”. The title also alludes to the specific bodily and social conditions that pregnancy and childbirth impose on women in western culture and is echoed in the sculptural concept itself, which precisely collapses the labour of social reproduction with that of biological reproductive labour: the pregnant belly sculptures were cast in translucent reinforced PVC and filled with everyday objects ranging from kitchen utensils, artificial flowers and baby shoes to comforters, old paper dolls, and pieces of clothing (the two series of 1971 and 1973 are somewhat different). Pregnancy is thus shown to involve not only the expected biological foetus—not visible in Justesen’s casts—but a whole range of social expectations of maternal domestic labour and childcare. The choice of translucent plastic in non-naturalistic luminous colours makes it clear that Omstændigheder is not a tribute to “natural motherhood”, as defined and celebrated within patriarchal world views as well as some essentialist eco-feminist images of the prehistoric matriarchal Great Mother. Rather, the project is about the construction of motherhood. Justesen’s conceptual strategy of folding the household work into the pregnant belly indicates the way the biological processes of pregnancy and birth have been culturally constructed to define women’s social and economic position.

Kirsten Justesen 195

Figure 11.3  K risten Justesen, Omstændigheder (Circumstances), The PVC Series 1970–1971, one of 11 PVC vacuumed casts, mixed media, paint on wood, 24.4 × 18.9 × 7.1 in. (62 × 48 × 18 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

The Omstændigheder sculptures are modelled from the artist’s own body, as is shown in the films and photographic works documenting the casting and other nude performances associated with the work (Fig. 11.3). But even the documentary photographs maintain the distancing techniques of conceptual art as they capture the artist parading the natural shape of the big belly while donning a theatrically painted grotesque face, or posing in staged household situations that, at times, include textual slogans such as “Pussy Power” or “The point is not to depict reality but to change it”. Although Justesen used her own body, the emphasis was less on the individual psychological experience of pregnancy and birth and more on gender politics and the cultural conditions of maternity. In the staged photographs as well as the sculptures, there is a balance between verfremdung and recognition. The distinctly industrial PVC bellies are conceptual versions of the pregnant body. They can be recognised as pregnant shapes, and even celebrate the beauty of the pregnant female body, while at the same time creating an analytical distance and pointing out the social construction of maternity. The theme of pregnancy and motherhood was pursued in later works by Justesen, as documented, for example, in the collectively edited book Billedet som kampmiddel (Image as Weapon) that grew out of the Women’s Exhibition XX in 1975.

196  Tania Ørum Justesen’s contribution is a collage of text and images on pregnancy, motherhood, and domesticity as personal and political conditions of women’s lives. 22 One series titled Husmorbilleder (Housewife Images) (1974–1975) includes collages of a baby in a frying pan, a cityscape of feeding bottles, and a woman addressing an audience of pots and pans from a rostrum in front of well-known paintings of nude women by male painters such as Ingres, Rubens, and Matisse. The text describes how difficult it is to work as a professional artist when you have to take care of babies and housework: “My studio is still the room in between the children’s room and the kitchen”. To work as a sculptor demands space and costly facilities, and sculptures are expensive to transport. To circumnavigate these obstacles, Justesen used what was at hand: her own body and, less expensive yet, abundant materials like paper and household utensils. She worked with photography and silkscreen prints that could be made anywhere, multiplied, and mailed to others. “The elements I describe”, she notes, “are from real life: the coffee pot, the landscape, the children, the clothes, the frying pan, the nappies, the houses, the feeding bottles”. 23 The conceptual approach that Justesen applies to these materials, however, gives the familiar objects of real life an unfamiliar framing that serves to denaturalise the conventional images of domesticity, motherhood in particular.

Images of Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation One of Justesen’s staged photographic collages, Klassekampen (Class Struggle) was used as a poster image for the exhibition Husmorbilleder (Housewife Images) at the Women’s Gallery in Aarhus in 1977 (Fig. 11.4). In the image, Justesen appears as a housewife in a dressing gown—her hair in curlers, her feet in fur-trimmed slippers and a cigarette in her hand—intent on reading a sheet bearing the legend “Class Struggle” in large letters, in the middle of a kitchen filled with everyday clutter. The careful symmetry of the picture centres the woman between the two children playing in the background, while the diagonal picks out the vacuum cleaner in the lower left side in contrast to the sculpture in the upper right. The statement “From a housewife’s short story” provides context for the scene.24 This text and the accompanying photographs illustrate the situation of the female artist whose studio is located “in between the children’s room and the kitchen”. It is, however, clearly a staged photograph in which Justesen has dressed up as an almost parodical clichéd figure of a housewife. The verfremdung of the image turns the photo-collage into a more general political statement about women’s place in the class struggles of the 1970s, evoking the slogan of the annual festivals of the Danish women’s movement: “No women’s struggle without class struggle. No class struggle without women’s struggle”, foregrounding the connection between economic and gender equality. Justesen’s staging suggests that the naturalised roles of mother and wife are part of a broader political and economic field. Klassekampen announces that class struggle is relevant to women, as is evident in the woman’s absorption in reading the sheet—only the class struggle seems to take place somewhere other than the domestic space in which she is situated. No partner or co-parent is visible to help clean up the kitchen and take care of the children, and the woman is hardly dressed to take part in political activities outside the home, such as the factory strikes or student and Vietnam demonstrations that were the priority of left-wing politics at the time. In this way, the photograph offers an ironic comment

Kirsten Justesen 197

Figure 11.4  K risten Justesen, Klassekampen (Class Struggle), 1976, pigment print on Somerset Satin-Enhanced 350 gr, 68.9 × 94.5 in. (175 × 240 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

on women’s place in left-wing politics and points out the complexities of integrating gender struggle and class struggle. Read another way, the photocollage does present a class struggle but from a historically elided perspective, that of the housewife/mother, a perspective that advances the role of women’s reproductive labour as an essential, but invisible, driver of the economy, a point that was mostly absent from Marxist debates at the time. While some feminist groups in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States, took up the cause of wages for housework, it was never a central issue in the feminist movement in Denmark, yet its sentiments resonate within Justesen’s provocative imagery. Another staged photograph from the same period offers a similarly complex view of women’s liberation. The tableau Lunch (1975) shows a naked woman (Justesen) in a shopping trolley in the middle of a deserted country road (Fig. 11.5). The leafless trees suggest that this is an inclement environment for a naked body, although the green fields may signal that spring is coming.25 A shopping trolley is, of course, intended to carry articles bought in a supermarket, so the woman would seem to appear here as a commodity, like a steak or plucked chicken, to be consumed for lunch. 26 Yet the woman flings out her arms in a gesture of joy and liberation, as if her trolley is headed towards freedom and unlimited possibilities. Again, the message is complex and the image allows for different readings: maybe the woman has escaped the consumer society of the city and returned to nature? Maybe women’s liberation

198  Tania Ørum

Figure 11.5  Kristen Justesen, Lunch, 1975, C-print, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

is not so swift and easy in a capitalist and male-dominated society? Justesen herself commented on the ambiguity of the image in a newspaper interview, when she said that the woman was in “a bad dream—or perhaps on the road to revolution”. 27 The title Lunch indicates that the image is also an art-historical comment on the theme of “le déjeuner sur l’herbe” as famously painted by male artists such as Manet, Picasso, and others, wherein a naked woman is having lunch in the company of fully dressed men in a natural setting. Unlike Manet’s naked woman, however, the woman in Justesen’s tableau is not presented in a frontal position for visual consumption. Instead, she has her back turned to viewers and seems happily released from any relationship to men or other observers, glad to be moving toward the horizon on her own. Justesen’s art was often too ambiguous for political propaganda. The rich gesture of liberation seen in the Lunch photograph, however, has intrigued and inspired several generations of women, even sparking a remake in 2013 by the writer and artist Eva Tind. 28

Conclusion The cultural and visual representation of women and women’s bodies is a theme that runs throughout Kirsten Justesen’s work. Interestingly, she worked as a stage designer throughout her career, and the performing bodies of other women have also found their way into her work. In the series Dansebilleder (Dance Images, 1972), for example, her interest in capturing the movements of other bodies as well as those of historical and legendary female figures is clear. Whether citing her own body or those of other women, Justesen’s art critically stages and revives or revises the sociocultural

Kirsten Justesen 199 conditions that have come to shape women’s lives and, by extension, the legibility of their bodies within them. While the use of her own body links her practice to her personal experiences, the conceptual dynamics at play have allowed for the relationships between private and public, personal and political, to take various forms. The female body and the everyday objects with which it interacts in Justesen’s works are immediately recognisable. The conceptual organisation of the images, however, provides a degree of verfremdung that makes the viewer pause and reflect. The ability of her work to flag the mundane and the illusive, the familiar and the obscured, counts her among the pioneers of experimental feminist art in Denmark.

Notes 1 Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1998), 12, 16. 2 See Birgitte Anderberg, “What’s Happening,” in What’s Happening, ed. Anderberg, (Copenhagen: Copenhagen SMK, 2015), 9–96. Catalogue to the exhibition, “What’s Happening,” at the National Gallery. 3 See Tonja Boos and Marta Kuzma, eds., Whatever Happened to Sexuality in Scandinavia? (London: Koenig Books, 2011). 4 For more information about the Experimental Art School and Danish 1960s avant-garde, see Tania Ørum, De eksperimenterende tressere [The Experimental Sixties] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009), and Tania Ørum and Jesper Olsson, eds., A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950–1975 (Leyden and Boston: Brill, 2012). 5 Ørum, De eksperimenterende tressere, 676. 6 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, in Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), 116–147. First published in Artforum, June, 1967 7 For Ancher, see the recent catalogue, Anna Ancher, ed. Peter Nørgaard Larsen (Copenhagen: SMK, 2020). For Hammershøi, see Annette Rosenvold Hvidt and Gertrud Oelsner, Vilhelm Hammershøi (Copenhagen: Lindhardt & Ringhof, 2018). 8 Jette Lundby Levy, Dobbeltblikket (Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter, 1980). John Berger also describes how “Men Look at Women. Women Watch Themselves Being Looked at,” in Ways of Seeing (London: the British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), 47. 9 See Ørum, De eksperimenterende tressere, 676–677. 10 See Ørum, De eksperimenterende tressere. 11 See Kirsten Justesen, “Fra en husmornovelle,” in Lilith, ed. Billedet som kampmiddel. Kvindebilleder mellem 1968 og 1977 [Image as Weapon–Images of Women between 1968 and 1977] (Copenhagen: Informations Forlag, 1977), 121–129. The text is translated as “From a Housewife’s Short Story,” in Anderberg, ed., What’s Happening, 192–193. 12 Krauss’s concept was developed in the essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” in The Originality of The Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 276–290. It implies a “stretching” of the term sculpture that occurs with postmodernism and ruptures the bounded condition of both classical and modernist sculpture. The collective work of the Kanonklubben group included the creation of a garden for a newly built nursing home. For Haven The Garden (1969–1971), see Lars Bang Larsen, “The Oslo Trip and The Garden” in A Cultural History of the AvantGarde in the Nordic Countries, ed. Ørum and Olsson (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi), 642–648. 13 See Ørum, De eksperimenterende tressere, 681–683; and Birgitte Anderberg “Images of Women”, in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, ed. Ørum and Olsson, 81–87. 14 See Ørum, De eksperimenterende tressere, 682–683. 15 Quoted from Jytte Rex’s description of the series of events in Lilith, ed. Billedet som kampmiddel, 57.

200  Tania Ørum 16 Rex and Justesen, producers, Tornerose var et vakkert barn (1971), 16 mm (orig. S8 mm), color, sound, 20 min. SFC [The Public Film Centre]. 17 See Tania Ørum, “Danish Avant-Garde Filmmakers of the 1960s,” in Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann, ed. Avant-Garde Film (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 261–276; Tania Ørum, “ABCinema and Super 8 Technology,” in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, ed. Ørum & Olsson (Leiden: Brill/ Rodopi, 2016), 422–432; and Anderberg, “Images of Women,” in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, ed. Ørum & Olsson (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2016), 81–87. 18 See also Birgitte Anderberg’s analysis of the Images of Women series and the Tornerose film in Anderberg, ed., What’s Happening (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst), 54–61. 19 Marina Abramović did her hair-brushing performance “Art must be beautiful/Artist must be beautiful” and Valie Export performed her “Tapp und Tast Kino” for which she walked round the streets of Copenhagen asking people to put their hand inside the box she was carrying on her chest and touch her breasts. 20 See Anderberg, ed., What’s Happening, 91–93. 21 Ørum, De eksperimenterende tressere, 680. 22 Justesen, “Fra en husmornovelle,” in Lilith, ed. Billedet som kampmiddel, 121–129. The text is translated as “From a Housewife’s Short Story,” in Anderberg, ed., What’s Happening, 192–193. 23 “From a Housewife’s Short Story,” in Anderberg, ed., What’s Happening, 193. 24 Justesen, in Lilith (ed.) Billedet som kampmiddel, 128. “Klassekampen” has been used in different versions and contexts and has become an iconic example of Justesen’s feminist art. 25 In later works, Justesen has repeatedly placed the naked female body in relation to ice, for example in the series of staged photographs from Greenland showing Justesen’s naked body in landscapes of snow and ice (1980–1985), and in the series of performances called Melting Time #1–17 (1983–2013). 26 In Danish male slang, an attractive woman could be termed a “steak”. 27 Politiken, 4 March 1975, and quoted in Birgitte Anderberg, “Performing Feminism– Kirsten Justesen,” in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, ed. Ørum & Olsson (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi), 575. 28 The staged photograph by Eva Tind, also called “Lunch” shows the artist sitting in a shopping trolley in the middle of a country road, but unlike Justesen she turns her unsmiling face and her body covered by her bent legs towards the viewer, and her arms are not lifted in triumph, but folded across her legs. The bleak landscape and the woman’s pose suggest that the liberation anticipated in Justesen’s photo has not materialised. www.evatind.dk/?portfolio=lunch-i-drivhuset&lang=da.

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Index

Note: Italicized pages refer to figures. Aboriginal art 90, 93, 96, 99–101 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 98 Abramović, Marina 143, 186, 193, 200n19 abstraction 60, 61, 94, 112, 127, 150, 156, 166n10, 187 Academy of Fine Art 186 Accardi, Carla 74; Tenda 74 Acconci, Vito 141 activism 3, 6, 12, 15, 16, 63, 69, 91, 98–99, 123, 125, 130, 133, 140, 146, 149, 155, 190, 192–193 activist art 91, 98–99, 155 Adams, Carol J. 79 African Art Centre, Durban 129 African diaspora 171 African National Congress (ANC) 123, 125, 133 African total theatre 171 Afrikaans 124 Afro-Asian 169–181 Ai Qing 113 AIR gallery 144–148 Ai Weiwei 113 Alexander, Jacqui: Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Future 3 Alexandra Arts Centre 129 Alpendre Gallery, Rio de Janeiro 60 Althusser, Louis 109–110; “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” 114 Alves, Margarida Brito 70n25 Amaral, Antônio Henrique: Campos de batalha (Battlefields) 62–63 American Redstocking group 191 Amerindian perspectivism 52 Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) 97 Ancher, Anna 189 ANC see African National Congress (ANC) Andean culture 46 Anderson, Ilona 136n40

Andre, Carl 149 Angus, Patricia Monture 37 anti-colonialism 93, 108, 150 anti-essentialism 148, 150 Anzaldúa, Gloria: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color 3, 147, 149, 152n30 Apartheid, South Africa 123–134 Appadurai, Arjun 18 APY see Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) ARC (Animation-Recherche-Confrontation) 72, 74, 80 Arnold, Marion 12, 124, 127–129; Divinely Appointed the Property of Ladies 128; Insight 128 art and politics, in the 1960s and 1970s 190–194 Art Forum International 159 Art in America 143, 159 artistic process 2, 4–12, 15, 30, 51, 53, 68, 101, 108–109, 178, 190–194 Artists and Radical Education in Latin America (1960/1970) 70n25 Australia 11, 89–102 Australia at War exhibition (1945) 91 Australian arts feminism 89–102 Bacalzo, Dan 110 Bandeiras na Praça (Flags in the Square) 67 Bang Tae-Soo 163 Bardon, Geoffrey 97 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 111 Battiste, Marie 36 Beal, Frances: “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” 3 Beauvoir, Simone de: Second Sex, The 78 Bédard, Yvonne 28, 36–38 Berger, Aliye 78 Best, Susan 148 Biko, Steve 124

218  Index Bindle, Norah 102n6 Binkley, Lisa xii, 2, 9, 27 Binns, Vivienne 11, 93–96, 99, 101, 102; Suggon 96; Vag Dens 94, 95, 96; Vivienne Binns: Paintings and constructions 94 BIPOC see Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) activists Black Consciousness Movement 124 Black feminism 3, 21n12, 23n31, 98, 104n33, 147, 152n29 “Black Feminist Statement, A” 3, 147, 152n29 Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) activists 3, 5 Black National Feminist Organization 3 Black Power movements 99 Blocker, Jane 148 Bloom, Lisa 17 body art 13, 15, 139, 154, 155, 158–162, 164, 185, 186; “earth body art” 139–140, 144 Boltanski, Christian 80 Boyd, Nan Alamilla 115 borders 1, 2, 6, 7, 78n33, 81, 95, 114, 127 Braidotti, Rosi 83 Brazil: A Report on Torture 66 Brazilian Military Dictatorship 57, 69, 70n22, 70n30, 206 Breder, Hans 141 Briggs, Laura 6 Broude, Norma 17 Bryant, Linda Goode 176, 178 Bryan-Wilson, Julia 8, 13, 52, 139 Buck-Morss, Susan 114 Burak, Sevim 78 Burckhardt, Jacob L. 75 Camargo, Iberê 60 Camnitzer, Luis 141 Camp Inc 91 Canadian Bill of Rights: Section 15, 36; Section 15(1) 37 capitalism 2, 6, 7, 18, 22n27, 51, 54n6, 91, 110, 149 Caron, Caro: Who Is Ana Mendieta? 147 Catherine, M. Lord 17; Essays in Migratory Aesthetics 18 censorship 10, 58, 59, 65, 66, 68, 94 ceremony 9, 29–30, 32–34, 99, 101 ceremonial dress, as matriarchal knowledgeways 28–30, 29 C’est Si Bon 159–160 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 54n16, 55n33 Chan, Charlie 111 Cheng, Meiling 110 Chicago, Judy 123; Dinner Party, The 95 Chin Davidson, Jane xii–xiii, 8, 13, 18, 106

Chinese Cultural Revolution 1 Chineseness 12, 13, 110, 117–118 Choi Boong-Hyun 159 Chong, Ping 111 Chosun 160–161 Christiansen, Ursula Reuter 194 Citino, Emily xiii, 10, 57 citizenship 1, 6, 57, 58, 62, 89, 133, 156, 164, 174 Civil Rights 1, 106 Clark, Lygia 66, 171 class struggle 196–198 CNV see Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV) (National Truth Commission) coda 149–151 Cold War 1, 93 collaboration 4–5, 12, 65–66, 156, 162, 177 Collaro, Viera 187 colonial histories 27–38, 49–51, 54–55, 76, 79–80, 90–91, 98, 101–102, 107 colonialism 33–34, 37, 51, 76, 80 Combahee River Collective (CRC) 3, 147 Comick, Dina 131 Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV) (National Truth Commission) 65 common differences 9, 15–16, 19n5 Communist Party of Turkey (CPT) 78 community 176–178 conceptual art 143, 144, 157, 178, 185, 186, 191, 192, 194, 195 constructing 8–11 contemporary art 19n3, 19n6, 19n17, 67, 72, 74, 96, 150, 157, 159, 164, 186 Contextures 178 Cornwallis, Edward 31 corporeality 9, 14, 150 costume study 169 CPT see Communist Party of Turkey (CPT) CRC see Combahee River Collective (CRC) craft 27, 37, 90, 95, 98, 102, 122, 129, 194 creation stories 89–102 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams 3 critical race theory 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 76, 101, 110–118, 131, 140, 142, 143, 151 cross-cultural 7, 12, 90, 100–101, 146, 170, 176–177 cross dressing 112 Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) 65 “Culture and Resistance Festival” of 1982 133 Cuomo, Chris J. 78 Dada 13 da Matta, Sérgio 57, 66, 68 dance 29, 30, 102n6, 111, 115, 171, 174–176, 179, 181, 198 Dawes, Nicholas 127

Index 219 De Arte 130 decolonial 3, 18 Delphy, Christine 76 Denizart, Hugo 57, 66, 68 de Zegher, Catherine 50–51, 54n13 Dhlomo, Bongi 12, 129 Dias, Antonio 61 diaspora 5, 11, 13, 118, 171 difference, in women’s experience 6–9, 78, 79, 90, 93, 98, 102, 175 Dimirakaki, Angela 18 discrimination 122–134, 146, 158, 162, 164 #DismantalNoMA 22n23 display, as resistance 33–37 division of labor 6 double gaze 189 D’Souza, Aruna 8, 17; Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn 4 Duchamp, Marcel 159 Duncan, Carol 17 Dupaigne, Bernard 74–75 Durant, Sam: Essays in Migratory Aesthetics 18 Earth Art 150 Eh-Juh-Tho group 162 Embellishments 12 Emery, Frances 93 Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, The 3 Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (2012 exhibition) 41 ephemerality 9, 10, 15, 59, 61, 144, 173, 196 erotic bondage 61 essentialism 20n9, 90, 96, 100–101, 148, 150 ethnography 83 Evergood, Philip 91 exhibitions, as resistance 33–37 Expeditionary Series (aka East Meets West series) 12–13, 106–110, 120n15 Experimental Art School, Copenhagen 187 Expo ‘67, 34, 38 “Exposição Tropicalista, Pintura de Mulher” (Tropicalist Exhibition, Painting of Woman) 61 Extension of University Education Act of 1959 129 Farber, Leora 131–132; Delusions of Grandeur 132, 132, 133 Farrington, Lisa 17 feminism 33, 38, 50, 62, 74, 123–125, 129, 133, 134, 134n8, 140, 141, 146, 147, 154, 160, 166n6, 168n59, 193; 1970s 90–91; Aboriginal 98; Australian arts 89–102; Black 3, 21n12, 23n31, 98, 104n33, 147,

152n29; Chinese 117, 118; First Nations 98; French 114; locating and dislocating 1–18; mainstream 76; Marxist 11, 18, 72, 91–93; Native 28; Third World 3, 4, 76, 147, 148; transnational (see transnational feminism); US 95, 96, 110, 144; western 131; White 12, 148; see also individual entries feminist art 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16–18, 74, 90, 95, 102n6, 140, 141, 146, 149, 154, 156, 160, 167n40, 176, 185, 186, 192, 193; conceptual 194–196; from the early 1980s 124–129, 125, 126, 128; from the late 1980s and beyond 131–134; Korean Feminist Art 154, 166n18, 211 Feminist Avant-Gardes of the 1970s, The (Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna) 74 femininity 27, 30, 69, 142, 185 Fernández, María 17 Fitzpatrick, Kirsten 99 Foucault, Michel 114 Fouque, Antoinette 76 4th Group, The 162–163, 164, 168n52 Friedan, Betty 76 Fried, Michael 188 Fu Manchu 111, 116 Funeral Ceremony of the Established Art and Culture (1970) 155, 168n52; see also Shinjeon Group Fusco, Coco 17, 149 Futurism 13 Galindo, Regina José 149 Garrard, Mary 17 Gates, Merryn 94 Geiger, Anna Bella 70n25 Gèlèdé, Yoruba 181 gender and sexual politics 1, 21n20, 155, 207 gendered essentialism 90 gendering intermedia 141–144 gender-specific violence 64 Gerchman, Rubens 61 German, Tülay 78 girl-artist 44 Glissant, Édouard 101 globalisation 51, 112 global sisterhood 20n9 global-turn 3, 22n27 global warming 51 goddesses 144, 152n22 Godfrey, Tony 186 Goldner, Janet: South African Mail, Messages from Inside: Women Artists in Resistance 130

220  Index Gómez-Barris, Macarena: Extractive Zone 54n6, 55n27 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 17 González, Jennifer 17 Gopinath, Gayatri 18 greatness 17 Greer, Germaine 17, 76 Grewal, Inderpal 2, 112 Gropper, William 91 Grynberg, Halina 57, 65, 66, 68, 71n39 Gullar, Ferreira 66, 67 Gutai Art Association (Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai) 171, 174, 179 Haga, Tōre: Avant-garde Art in Japan 174 Hall, Stuart 171 Hammershøi, Vilhelm 189 Hammons, David 177, 180 Hankuk 161 happenings 2, 15, 16, 154–156, 157, 158–159, 161, 162, 164, 166n11, 186, 190, 191 “Happening Show” 159 Haraway, Donna 49; “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective on Feminist Epistemologies and Objectivity” 47 Haring, Keith 111 Harris, Ann Sutherland: Women Artists 1550–1950 17 Hartman, Saidiya 51; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments 44–45 Hassim, Shireen 123, 131, 135n34 Hassinger, Maren 180; Performance Piece 173 Hawthorn Report (1966–1967) 27, 35 Haynes, Robert-Kristoffer 111 Henshaw, John 95 Heresies 144, 147 heteronormative 76, 108, 112 heteropatriarchy 28, 38 Hikmet, Nazım 85n38 Hirshhorn Gallery 139 Holt, Nancy 51 Homelands Movement 90 homophobia 12, 149 housekeeper-artist 44 Hudson Bay Company 31 human mastery 49 Hwang, David Henry 117 identity 3, 8, 11–14, 23n35, 27, 34, 36, 38, 62, 78, 81–83, 97, 100–101, 106–107, 109–111, 114, 116, 118, 120, 128, 140–143, 150, 154, 158, 175, 185, 201 impermeable nature/culture divisions 54n16 Inca method 46 incorporeality 163–164

Indian Act of 1876 31, 32, 35, 37; Section 12(1)(b) 28, 36 Indian Residential Schools 31 Indians of Canada exhibition 34–35 Indigeneity 10, 28, 34 Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference (1971) 3 installation 10, 11, 27, 33, 38, 42, 46, 61, 67, 72, 81, 95, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 171, 179, 180, 189 Institute of Race Relations 129 Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) 58 institutional torture 64–66 insubordinate bodies 57–69 intergenerational perspectives 89 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 37 International Women’s Day 92 International Women’s Year 62 interpersonal “flourishing” 78 intersectionality 3, 89 intersubjective 8, 13, 160 Isaacs, Jennifer 100 isiXhosa 12, 122, 129 isiZulu 12, 122 Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists (Institute of Contemporary Art, London) 74 iterative 9, 10, 13, 41, 45, 76, 144 Itō, Michio 175 James, Gloria Fletcher 89 Johannesburg Art Foundation 133 Johnson, Margaret “Granny” 16; Mi’kmaq ribbon skirt 9, 10, 27–38 Jones, Amelia 7, 17, 107–108 JoongAng 161 Jørgensen, Anita 187 Jornal do Brasil 61, 68 Joseph, Helen 127 Jung Chan-Seung 154, 159, 164, 168n52, 168n58 Jung Kang-Ja 2, 13, 14, 154–165; body art 154, 155, 157, 158–162, 161, 164; From Corporeality to In-corporality 163; Demonstration against the Revitalising Reform 164; Funeral Ceremony of the Established Art and Culture 155, 168n52; Kiss Me 156–158, 157, 161, 162; Murder at the Han Riverside 155, 168n58; Murderer, The 158; Myungdong 164–165, 165; No Body (Moo-Che) 162–164; STOP 158, 162; Suppressed 162–164; Transparent Balloon and Nude 155, 155, 159, 161, 164, 168n59; Women’s Fountain 158, 162 Justesen, Kirsten 13, 185–199; class struggle and women’s liberation 196–198, 197, 198; conceptual feminist art 194–196; Damebilleder (Images of

Index 221 Women) 15, 191–193; Dansebilleder 198; Husmorbilleder (Housewife Images) 196; Images of Women 185; Klassekampen (Class Struggle) 196–197, 197; Lunch 197–198, 198; Omstændigheder 194– 195, 195; Sculpture I & II 15, 185, 187, 187–190, 188 Kabuki theatre 14, 169, 179, 180 Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art 127 Kang Kuk-Jin 154, 159, 162, 164, 168n58 Kanonklubben (the Canon Club) 190–194 Kaplan, Caren 2, 112 Kaprow, Alan 158 Katz, Robert: Naked by the Window 147 Kemal, Yaşar 79, 85n38; Legend of the Thousand Bulls, The 78, 79 Khlebnikov, Viktor (Velimir) 79; Proposals 80 Kim Jong-Mock 155, 158 Kim Ku-Lim 154, 155, 164, 168n52 Kim Young-Ja 156 King, Debrah: “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology” 3 Kingston, Hong: Woman Warrior, The 117 Kluge, Helen Lait 194 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame 97 knowledge: diffusion 51; objective 47, 50; situated 47, 49, 50 Kollwitz, Käthe 91 Korean avant-garde art 164–165, 166n6, 167n25, 168n59 Korean Experimental Art 154–165 Korean Feminist Art 154, 166–167n18, 211 Kosuth, Joseph 178 Krahulik, Karen 106 Krauss, Rosalind 191 Krishna, Sankaran 81 Kristeva, Julia 113; About Chinese Women 112 Kurds, Kurdish People 5, 72, 74, 78–83 Kuspit, Donald 142 Kvindeudstillingen XX (The Women’s Exhibition XX) (Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen 1975) 193 Kwon, Miwon 140 LaHache, Mary Anne 36, 40n35 LaMarsh, Judy 35 Lamoni, Giulia 70n25 land art 10, 41, 42, 50, 52, 53n3, 144 Landau, Saul 66 Latin America 1 Latin American Women Artists 1915–1985 140

Lavell, Jeannette 28, 36–38 Lee, Phil xiii, 2, 14, 15; Murder at the Han Riverside 14–15; Transparent Balloons and Nude 14 Legend of the Thousand Bulls, The 78, 80 Le Guin, Ursula 51; “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” 44 Leirner, Nelson 67 Lester Horton Dance Company 175 Lévinas, Emmanuel 51 Levi-Strauss, Claude: Anthropologie Structurale 76; Race et Histoire 76 Levy, Jette Lundby 189 Lewis, Desiree 131 libidinous female body 93–96 Liddle, Celeste 98 Life 159 Lippard, Lucy R. 17, 74, 141, 143; “Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art, The” 143; “Transformation Art” 143 Long, Richard 51 Lookofsky, Sarah 8, 10, 13, 16, 41 Lugones, María 73 Lynn, Elwyn 95 Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta: Daily Life in Revolutionary China 112–113 Machida, Margo 17 Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie 127 Magar, Richa 4 Magi(o)cean 61 Magnuson, Ann 111 mainstream feminism 76 Maíz-Peña, Magdelena 148 Majoribanks, Robert 34 MANCHU DRAGONCostumes,1644–1912 exhibition, THE 118 “Manifesto Neoconcreto” (Neoconcrete Manifesto) (1959) 66 Mao Wallpaper exhibition, Paris (1974) 118–119 Mao Zedong 12, 13, 106; empty suit 112–114; Militia Women 112; “On Contradiction” 110 Martin, Richard 118 Marx, Karl 114 Marxism 3, 72, 78, 91–93, 107, 109, 112–114, 118, 197 masculinity 34, 95, 109, 111, 116, 118, 119 material culture 2 materiality 9, 11, 14, 176, 179, 190 Mayer, Olive 103n20 Ma Yuan 118–119; On a Mountain Path in Spring 119 McCullough, Barbara 180

222  Index McMahon, Marie 95 McMillan, Uri 17, 178 Meaning of One Twenty-fourth of a Second, The (1969–1970) 155; see also Shinjeon Group mediating 11–13 Médici, Emílio Garrastazu 58 Medu Art Ensemble 125 Mejane 91 Mendieta, Ana 13, 139–151, 186; activism 144–147; All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave 147; Árbol de La Vida 150; coda 149–151; Earth Body 139; Esculturas Rupestres/Rupestrian Sculptures exhibition 145–146, 146, 148; feminist receptions 147–149; Fetish series 148; Furrows 150, 150–151; gendering intermedia 141–144; “Great Goddess, The” 144; Homenaje a Ana Mendieta 149; La Venus Negra (The Black Venus) 146; Moffitt Building Piece 139–141, 140; Rastras Corporales (Body Tracks) 149; Silueta Series 142, 144–145, 145, 148; Silueto de Laberinto 144; Sweating Blood 141–142, 149; tableaux 15; Untitled (Rape Scene) 141, 142, 143; Weight of Blood, The 149 Mendieta, Raquelín 149 Merewether, Charles 148 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 66 Merz, Mario 53n3, 74 Meskimmon, Marsha 18 MFPA see Movimento Feminino pela Anistia (Feminine movement for amnesty) (MFPA) Mgudlandlu, Gladys 23n39 Mi’kmaq ribbon skirt 9–10, 27–38; ­ceremonial dress and traditional ­teachings, as matriarchal knowledge ways 28–30, 29; exhibitions and display, as resistance 33–37; textiles and making, as resilience and reclamation 30–33, 32 Mi’kmaw 29–34, 39n21, 40n38, 202 Milgate, Rodney 95 Millet, Kate: Sexual Politics 76 Millner, Jacqueline xiii, 8, 11, 12, 89 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 17, 18, 20n6 minimalism/minimalist 185, 188–190 misogyny 36, 117 Mizue 159 mobility 170 modernism 12, 91, 122, 148 modern art 16, 63, 95, 110, 115 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 3, 6–7, 19n5, 28, 76; Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Future 3

Moore, Catorina xiv, 8, 11, 12, 89 Moraga, Cherrie: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color 3, 147, 149, 152n30 mother-artist 44 Motta, Flávio 67 Moura, Paulo 71n39 Movimento Feminino pela Anistia (Feminine movement for amnesty) (MFPA) 62 Mulher Mutante (Mutant Woman) 61 Muñoz, José Esteban 17, 109 Murder at the Han Riverside (1968) 14, 155, 168n58; see also Shinjeon Group Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris 72 Musée de l’Homme 72 Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) 61 Na Hye-Seok 154 Na Hye-Suk 156 Nam Sang-Jin 164 National Black Theatre 99 National Democratic Front 135n34 national identity 11, 13, 27, 34, 36, 81, 106, 109, 116, 118 National Reconstruction Project 158 National Security Archives (NSA) 65 Native Cultures 73 Native Feminist Theories 28, 34, 37 Nengudi, Senga 2, 13, 169–181; Ceremony for Freeway Fets 13, 179–180, 181; changing contexts 173–176; community 176–178; contextural practice 178–179; Costume Study for Mesh Mirage 169, 170; Freeway Fets 16, 179, 181; Performance Piece 173; R.S.V.P. (Répondez S’il Vous Plaît) 171, 172; Studio Performance with R.S.V.P. 174 Neo-Concrete Art 66–68, 71n42 neoliberal capitalism 51 Neuhaus, Mareike 28 New Nation 130 New Women’s Movement 154 Nochlin, Linda 2, 17, 20n6, 53n4; “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 17 Noh theatre 14, 175 nomad/nomadic women/nomadism 7, 9, 10–11, 16, 72–83; in Rosi Braidotti 83 Norman, S.J. 101, 102 Nova Figuração (new figuration) 60, 62 Nova Scotia 9, 33–34 Nova Scotia Museum 27, 31 NSA see National Security Archives (NSA)

Index 223 objective knowledge 47, 50 O’Conner, Alisa 11, 12, 89, 91–92, 101, 102, 103n20 O Globo 68 O’Grady, Lorraine 17 Oh Jin-Kyeong 166n18 Oh Kwang-Soo 156 Oiticica, Hélio 66 Operação Bandeirante 70n26 Operation Brother Sam 65 Orenstein, Gloria Feman: “Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women, The” 144 Orientalism 118 Ortwed, Kirsten 187 Ørum, Tania xiv, 15, 185 Out of New York Invitational (AIR 1977) 144 ÖZPINAR, Ceren xv, 7, 10, 11, 18, 72

politics of location 5–7 Pollock, Griselda 16, 133; Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology 17 positionality 7–8 postcolonial theory 3 postmodern 124, 199 poststructuralism 110 Powell, Ivor 130 Powell, Richard 171 Presbyterian Napranum (Napperanum) mission 98 protest 19n1, 22n23, 57, 59, 66, 68, 69n1, 74, 149, 165n4, 185, 192, 213

Page Act of 1875 115 Pane, Gina 143 Pape, Lygia: Divisor (Divider) 66–67 paramount masculinities 116–118 Park Chung-Hee 168n52 Parker, Rozsika: Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology 17 Park Jung-Hee 156, 164 Park Seo-Bo 157 Parrot’s Perch 65 Pasadena Art Museum 174 patriarchy 49, 76, 96 Peace and Friendship Treaty 38; of 1725 31; of 1726 34; of 1751 31; of 1752 31 Pérez, Laura E. 17 performance art 13, 23n41, 61, 67, 68, 70n36, 116, 144, 156, 166n6, 177, 183n32, 202, 203, 210, 213 performance, as protest 66–68 performance-photography 11, 109 performing 13–15 Perry, Gill 148 Petersen, Lene Adler 194 Petyarre, Kathleen 98 Phelan, Peggy 160, 167n40 Phillips, Marcy 178 Phipps, Alison 76 Phoenix, Frances (Budden): Queen of Spades 95 photography 12, 15, 108, 109, 112, 114, 116–117, 119–120, 190, 196 Picasso 122 Pindell, Howardena: Free, White, and 21 142 Pinder, Kymberly 17 Piper, Adrian 17, 143, 171; Mythic Being 142 plastiglomerates 49, 55n21

race 1–3, 6, 11, 13, 37, 76, 89–91, 93, 101, 109, 111, 112, 116, 117, 129, 131, 139, 140, 142, 143, 171, 178 racial injustice 175 racism 5, 12, 17, 22n23, 35–36, 91, 123, 146–147, 170, 178 Raine, Anne 148 Ramirez, Renya 28 Recollet, Karyn 28 Redfern, Christine: Who Is Ana Mendieta? 147 Refractory Girl 91 Reilly, Maura 18 relationality 90 repetition 10, 48, 53, 107, 148, 189 resourcing 49 Red Power, in North America 1 Rex, Jytte 186, 193 Rich, Adrienne: “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” 6 Richard, Nelly: “Margins and Institutions: Performances of the Chilean Avanzada” 65 Richards, Colin 132 Rich, B. Rudy 17 Ring, Anne Peterson 18 Robbroeck, Lize van 129, 130 Robcis, Camille 114 Røde Mor 194 Rødstrømpebevægelsen 3 Rødstrømper 191, 193 Rogoff, Irit 148 Rorimer, Anne 118 Rosenbach, Ulrike 143 Rosler, Martha 141 Roughsey, Dick 99 Rousseff, Dilma 70n26

queer art 106–119 queer feminist durationality 108 queer representation 112 queer theory 3, 7, 109 Quiroga, José 150

224  Index Royal Academy of Fine Arts 190 Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism 27, 35 Royal Commission on the Status of Women 27, 35, 36 Rupert’s Land 31 Sabia, Laura 35 Sabzalian, Leilani 28 Sajik Public Park 168n52 Salon of Brazilian Drawing 60 Santa Fe Indian Institute 100 Scarlet Woman 91 Schapiro, Miriam 123, 127 Schendel, Mira 66 Schmahmann, Brenda xv, 12, 122 Schneemann, Carolee 186 Schor, Mira 148 sculpture 15, 16, 34, 46, 59, 61, 95, 145, 146, 148, 150, 157, 169, 171, 175, 179, 181, 185–196 Sebidi, Helen Mmakgabo 23n39; child’s mother holds the sharp side of the knife, The 133 self-censorship 66 Sepulveda, Gabriela Aceves 17 settler-colonial 27, 33–36, 38, 49, 79, 90–91, 107 sexism 12, 146, 149, 170, 171, 178 sex symbols, appropriation of 156–158 sexuality 61, 89–90, 94–95, 101, 110–112, 176, 186 sexual violence 64 Shaked, Nizan 183n39 Shim Sun-Hee 156 Shinjeon Group 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164; Happening with a Vinyl Umbrella and Candles, The 156, 158; Transparent Balloons and Nude 155, 155, 159, 161, 164 Shin Ki-Ok 156 Shohat, Ella 17, 18 Siebert, Kim 12, 128; What did your mother ever tell you about the Hard Edge School? 16, 122, 123 Simpson, Leanne 28 simultaneity 3 Siopsis, Penny 12, 131; Embellishments 125, 125–126; Melancholia 132, 133 situated knowledge 47, 49, 50 66 Signs of Neon 177–178 site-specific 10, 46, 181n3 Sklar, Morty 142 Smyth, Ethel: Dinner Party 95–96 snow queen 110–112 socialist realism 91 Soho 20 Gallery 147

Son Il-Kwang 168n52 South African Association of Art Historians, Transvaal Branch 131 South African National Gallery, Cape Town 130 Spero, Nancy 149 spiral 41–53, 42, 43, 45–47; curvature of 48–51; spiralling out 45–47, 45–48; weaving interdependencies 52–53 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 6 “State of Art in South Africa, The” (University of Cape Town, 1979) 125, 133 State of Emergency 124–125 Studio Z 177, 179 subjectivity 4, 17, 61, 76–78, 83, 93, 106 submerged perspective 54n6 Swarr, Amanda Lock 4 Sweeney, Helen 95 Sylliboy, Gabriel 31, 32 synthetic conceptualism 178 Tan, Amy 117 Tani, Ellen Y. xv, 2, 14, 146, 149, 169, 170, 171, 178 Tapié, Michel 174 Tejo, Cristiana 70n25 Tel Quel 113, 114 tents, in art 74–78 Tesfagiorgis, Freida High W. 17 textiles and making, as resilience and reclamation 30–33, 32 Thancoupie 11, 12, 96–101, 97, 104–105n44 theatre 14, 99, 162, 171, 175, 179 theory of conceptual materialism 178 Third World feminism 3, 148 Third World Women’s Alliance 3 Tickner, Lisa 17 Time 159 Tind, Eva 200n28 Tornerose var et vakkert barn (Sleeping Beauty) 176, 193 torture 57–59, 64–66, 69n1, 70n26, 70n31, 70n34, 71n41, 202 Tostes, Celeida 70n25 traditional teachings, as matriarchal knowledgeways 28–30 Transparent Balloons and Nude (1968) 14, 155, 155, 159, 161, 164, 168n58; see also Shinjeon Group transnational feminism 1, 6–8, 12–14, 16, 18, 22n27, 22n29, 74, 78, 80, 106, 108–110, 112, 114, 118, 119: and histories of art 2–5; see also feminism; see also individual entries Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art 1965–1985 4, 18 tribal cultures 73, 75–77

Index 225 Tricameral Parliament 124 Troyano, Ela 149 Tseng Kwong Chi 12–13, 106–119; Ambiguous Ambassador 13, 110, 111, 116; Disney Land, CA 111; East Meets West series (aka Expeditionary Series) 15, 106, 107, 110, 114; Hollywood Hills 116; immigration 114–116; monument 114– 116; paramount masculinities 116–118; Provincetown 106, 107, 108, 109, 118; San Francisco 114, 116 Tsing, Anna 49 Tuck, Eve 28 Turkmens 72, 81, 86 Twentieth National Salon of Modern Art 63 UAW see Union of Australian Women (UAW) Última Hora 64 Umkhonto weSizwe 125 Union of Australian Women (UAW) 93 United Democratic Front 124 United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid 130 United States 11 Ussing, Susanne 194 Utopia Women’s Batik Group 97 Vashti’s Voice 91 Vater, Regina: Nós 9, 10, 15, 16, 57–69, 58–60, 62, 64; “O nó a caminho do laço” (The Knot in the Loop’s Path) 68; “Regina Vater, Desata o nó” 68; Triptíco Nós (Triptych Knots) 61, 64 Vergara, Carlos 61 Vicuña, Cecilia xii, 9, 41, 42, 43, 45–47, 53, 54n10, 13, 15, 56n36, 201; Casa Espiral 9, 10, 41–53, 42, 43, 45–47, 54n13 Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit 103n20 violence: gender-specific 64; histories of, materialising 33, 74, 79–83; sexual 64; against women 141–142, 158–162 visual culture 3, 6, 108, 110 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 52 Voice of Women/Women Strike for Peace, The 3 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles) 2, 74 Walker, Cherryl: Women and Resistance 131 Walker, Joanna S. 148

Wallace, Michele 17 WAMs see Women’s Art Movements (WAMs) Warhol, Andy 118 Water Code (1981) 51 Watts Towers Art Center 177 Western cultural imperialism 175 Western imperialism 1 Wexler, Haskell 66 Where We At Collective 3 White feminism 12, 148 White Paper (1969) 27, 35 Williamson, Sue 12, 128; Few South Africans, A 126–127 Wilmott, Cory 30 Wilson, Martha 142 Wittig, Monique 76 Womanhouse 123 Woman’s Building, The 176 “Women and Gender in Southern Africa” (Gender Research Group, University of Natal 1991) 131 “Women and Gender in Southern Africa” conference 131 Women Artists in South Africa 130 Women of All Red Nations 3 Women’s Action Coalition 149 Women’s Art Movements (WAMs) 90 Women’s Festival of Arts 130 Women’s Fountain 158, 162 women’s liberation 196–198 Women’s Movement for Peace 127 Wood, Catherine 170 Workers Party (WP), in Turkey 78 WP see Workers Party (WP) Yalter, Nil 9, 11; nomadic tent structures 9; Rahime, Kurdish Woman from Turkey 81, 82–83; Round House 7, 16; Topak Ev 10, 72–83, 73, 77, 79, 82, 83 Yoko, Ono: Cut Piece 167n29 Yoon Jin-Sup 159 Yoshihara, Jiro 171 Young Artists Union 156, 158, 159, 161, 162 Young Artists Union Exhibition, The 156 Young, Roderick 180 Yunkaporta, Tyson 100 Zabunyan, Sarkis 80–81 Zanini, Walter 67 Zhongshan Zhuang 112